Animals That Move

To make texture with prismacolors, you have to control your pencil strokes and make sure to put in the high-lights and low-lights of the skin, fur, grass, etc. Since I needed to make fur for my pig, my pencil strokes were long and linear. I needed to look at my reference pictures a lot, to know where the fur got darker or lighter or was just another color altogether. Making the grass was very easy because all I needed to do was use different shades of green and make it darker the further back it went. However, the mud was not so easy for me; I'm just not sure what kind of texture mud has, so it ended up being a guessing game. In the end, I decided to make squiggles and swirls in browns and black. The fence looks a little wonky, since it's more yellow than I wanted it to be. At first I had a lot of trouble making value in this picture. Everything was just kind of the same shade. It took a lot of layering with the prismacolors to make it halfway decent.

Sketching out the ideas first was very helpful. It helps you figure out where everything will go and what colors to use. For example in my sketch of this picture, the pig was more red than pink. After looking at the sketch I had done, I realized that the pig wouldn’t look right if it wasn’t completely pink.  

My pig isn’t showing too much movement, since all it’s doing is walking in mud. I’m not sure how well I actually capture that, but all I was hoping for was that it would look a pig in mud. So I suppose I achieved my goal.