Tiger process

This is a little tiger idea I've been thinking about.  My idea feels too simple so I thought making some of the images might help unlock it.  There's a quick breakdown of how I made the image below.

I was working on this image on Friday which is also #colour_collective day, and I like to join in from time to time.  Luckily, the colours were a perfect fit for my tiger (see below).  I like how unusual the purpley blue is but I do think the darker colour I settled on is a bit punchier.

My colour collective original

Lately I've been making artwork like I would prepare a screen print.  For every colour I make a separate black layer.  Imagine the black lines are where the colour will be and imagine that where the paper is white will be clear.  Completely see through.  It takes a minute to get your head around this.  I like to use paint because I'm not very practised with a brush and it allows a less controlled line.  That's why I like this whole process, and it means I spend less time at a computer.

I knew this was going to be a two colour image (a dark and an orange plus white) but I wasn't sure if the background would be too busy so I broke the trees into two separations to make it easier to delete one if I needed to.  And I wanted to test the tiger outline in both paint and pencil so I kept that apart from the background.  This is what everything looks like separately.

Trees and paint tiger stripes

Bamboo

Tiger outlines and fur tests

The top row is the tiger outline.  As much as I like my backgrounds to feel loose, I still like the control I have with a pencil for character outlines.  I've drawn it twice because I was testing a regular HB pencil (left) versus a softer colouring pencil line (right).  The second row is me testing the fur texture of the tiger.  Ultimately, I used the image on the right.  I placed this over the tiger and coloured everything outside of it black too.  This was going to be my orange layer.

If I lay them all over each other you can get an idea of what the image will look like.

All the separations placed over each other

I scan all of these into the computer and line them up on my page.  I spent some time deciding between the painted stripes and the pencil and edited the layers accordingly.

Once I've blocked in the basic colours it looks like this.

Dark layer

Orange

One layer over the other

I then spend some time editing the image, adding details like highlights, whiskers and fur lines, and I make the image more textured.  I have a selection of textures I've created that I delete from laters to make them look more worn.  I also decide on the final image to use a yellow layer over a red instead of one layer of orange.  That way I could delete parts of each colour and you'd see the red and yellow peek through.

The final image looks like this

It probably seems like a long way of doing things but I find the painting relaxing.  My previous Dream Cars post was made similarly except I drew all the colour layers digitally in Procreate, there was no painting.  That works well for me with vehicles and structured items but for more natural imagery I prefer to paint in a traditional way.