“Akela“, the work previously known as “Gray Wolf I” was a pretty straight-forward airbrush/scratchboard piece. The steps were pretty straightforward:
- Prep the board: Using a gray Scot-Brite pad I scuffed the Claybord for paint to adhere better, and then I gave it a quick wipe-down with some heptane (i.e. Bestine).
- Transfer the image: Using a projector, I sketched in the important landmarks.
- Underpainting: Using the airbrush, I quickly blocked in the landmarks. I focused on getting close, or slightly darker, than my target colors for the fur, but wasn’t overly concerned with “staying in the lines”. The one exception was the eyes, with which I had to at least be close to the lines.
- First scratch: Once the underpainting was done, I started scratching in the fur, paying attention to orientation and coarseness. It is also here that I also did some texturing with erasers.
- Another coat of paint: To start to hit the colors and shades I wanted, I applied more transparent paint, sometimes coming near covering up some of my earlier scratches.
- Second scratch: Now I really try to hit the texture. The coarse hairs on the muzzle got special attention
- Details: Now I bounced back and forth between the airbrush and scratch tools to get things “just so”.
- More details: After sitting for a bit, I added the final touches and signed the painting.
- Varnish.
The short slideshow below shows a few steps of the process that are covered by 3-thru-7 above before a quick compare of the first and last image.
