Storm's Approach

I would like to Attempt a Capture of this Cute little Mudbray please also addeding that i themes it also for
Aprils theme of storms for the extra. Would like to add these browns don;t go any darker sadly i tryed as you can see Mudbray anf the Fence are still very light but smooth.

Difficulty - Hard
Target - Mudbray
Points needed - 55
Bonus April Theme - Storms

 

Claim!

 

@GhostlyGlaceon

It's no secret I like colored pencils; I've used them for quite a few pieces here. Thanks to advice from our friends here, as well as a healthy dose of Youtube, I'm learning a few tips and tricks that I hope to share with you.

First, I'd like to talk a little bit about Mudbray's anatomy. I remember you said on Discord that you had looked up pictures of horses laying down. Super weird, right? I think you've done a good job representing how it looks here, but I do want to point out a few places where it could have been improved a little. I'd like to use this picture for reference:



First, I'd like to talk about Mudbray's left hind leg. In my reference piture, we can see the horse's hoof pretty clearly. It's actually turned outward a little bit, toward the viewer. Mudbray's hoof, however, is completely hidden, as though it's turned toward his body. If you move your own foot around, you should see that it's pretty difficult for you to move your foot in a way that makes it face toward the center of your body without moving and bending your leg around quite a bit, too. Your foot, and Mudbray's hoof, pretty much follows the movement of the leg it's attached to. Therefore, since Mudbray's leg is facing slightly away from its body, its hoof should be, too.

The rest of Mudbray is drawn pretty well with only a few small issues. For example, the top part of his left foreleg looks really thin compared to the rest. In addition, I would have liked to see some more shadows or outlines so that we can differentiate between the different parts of his body. For example, you can see on my horse reference picture that there's a pretty obvious shadow under and around its thigh, even way above its stomach, but on Mudbray its all the same shade of brown. I love that his expression is a cross between curiosity (like, is it about to rain?) and languishing acceptance (Yup.)

I also love the little details you scattered around the picture. The saddle, the backpack, the grain on the fence, and the ripples in the water from the raindrops are all really nice touches. I wanna spend a second on the rain, since it's pretty important to the piece. For the rain, you used black, which makes it look like mud or something, and really darkens the mood of the picture. I had to think for a second, since I wasn't even sure how I would draw rain myself. So, I went to Google and found another reference piece:



Thing is, water in general is colorless, so really instead of having its own color, it just plays with the colors around it. You can see in this picture that the rain creates lighter spaces by refracting what little light there is. I'm going to talk a lot more about blending in a bit, but I think you may find it easier to create rain by using lighter colors and blending them into the background rather than going with black. Black is a pretty powerful color, and it caused the rain to become the darkest thing in your picture, whereas it really shouldn't have that color. I think you actually did something similar very successfully, and that's the individual hairs on the hanging in the foreground. Just like raindrops, those hairs are very thin and therefore they're made up of blended shades of gray rather than solid lines.

I can see that you used shadows pretty extensively in your picture, and in lots of different ways! I can see that you used shadows on the backpack to give it some shape and definition. Meanwhile, you used shadows on the ground in front of the fence to show the direction of the light. Finally, you did a really good job with the clouds, which are clearly much lighter in the places where they're thinner and the light would be able to get through more easily. My first criticism of the shadows is that the shadow from the center beam that falls across Mudbray's body is way darker than the shadows anywhere else, so it looks a little out of place.

You wrote that you had some trouble with the shadows since your colored pencils don't go any darker. In order to help you out, I'd like to spend some time talking about how you can improve your use of shadows without buying more colored pencils. In fact, this applies to all of the large fields of color in your piece, like the unshaded parts of the ground. The color is somewhat inconsistent--we can see places on the ground where it's lighter, and places where it's darker, that give away your pencil strokes. Furthermore, there's lots of little flecks of white throughout. These are things I struggled with quite a bit, too (you can check any of my earlier works!)

Turns out, those issues aren't too hard to solve with a little practice. This time, I drew my own reference picture:


View: http://imgur.com/a/uEPG0


I’ve got two colors here: A darker ‘base’ color and a lighter ‘blend’ color. The idea is, I want a circle with a darker hue that doesn’t have all those pesky white flecks. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you found, it’s hard to totally get rid of them when you’re only drawing with one color. In fact, pressing harder often tends to make them worse. That’s where the lighter color comes in. Once you’ve got your base color down, you can really press hard on the paper with the lighter color. We’re not just putting one layer of color on top of another here—part of blending color pencils is literally grinding the pigments together. So go to town grinding that lighter color in, using very small circles, just don’t rip the paper (I recommend using cardstock if you haven’t tried it already). The result is that instead of those white flecks, you fill in those teeny tiny spaces with the lighter color. Since it's closer to the base shade, it doesn’t stand out as much as the white of the paper does.

This technique also helps with shading, since it enables you to draw more varied shades. Take that darker brown shadow on the ground, for example, You could take the lighter colored pencil that you used for the rest of the ground and go over the darker bits with that shade, too. By blending them together, you get a shade of brown that’s darker than the base shade of the ground. If you run out of darker shades, don’t be afraid to use very light strokes of black. In the last blob on my reference picture, you can see that I blended a faint outline of black into the darker edges. Then, I took my blue pencil (the same as the one I labeled “Base,” by the way) and blended them together to get a darker shadow than the base color is capable of making on its own.

You may also find as you draw that it’s hard to go lighter, too! In those cases, you can use a white colored pencil as the blender to grind the pigment and smooth it out. I dunno what kind of pencils you’ve got, but even my no-budget Crayola pack had one in it. Imagine my surprise when I realized the white colored pencil had a purpose!

Overall

Anyhoo, that’s enough out of me for now. I’m awarding your picture a 55/55 because of the clear effort you put into a lot of the small details, like positioning Mudbray’s body correctly, and many of the objects in the background. Even though you struggled with shading, I think you’ll improve quickly. I highly recommend checking out tutorials on Youtube if you find that you can’t quite figure out how to do something you want to do with your pencils, color-wise. It may even be worthwhile to try that out on this picture for practice, although Mudbray is captured! Give me a shout if you ever want some more pointers!

Edit: I ALWAYS FORGET ABOUT THE THEME. Yours obviously qualifies for the rain/storm theme, so you can post here to claim your $5k!

 

WOO congrats. I started reading the curation and my heart sank, so that twist at the end has put me in a good mood.
- u-