Night Owls

I had seen this spread several times and was always amazed at how other colorists did their thing on them beautifully from their own inspirations. I had another idea for attacking it and thought I'd execute it best with the help of photos from the net. So I googled "digital night owls blue" and came up with images from dama.bg and natalieacupuncture.com. I thought I'd keep them as photo references as I got started with this page from Kerby Rosane's Animorphia.

I used Prismacolor wax based pencils on this project. I used Violet Blue and Ultramarine interchangeably. For forming the moon I used a small dish from our cupboard, I'm not a fan of compasses haha!

The background was what I did first. It was my first attempt in using solely pencil for background. Prior to this I was into using oil and soft pastels but developed allergy and rashes and so I kept them at bay for awhile.

Day three, I was finally working on the owl with spread wings.

Obviously it would now take longer to finish the background. When normally it only takes a few hours this one took two days since each page had three layers of color. When I finally got to the owl on the fifth day I think I was ready to shelve the project because the monotony was getting to me. I could see all the beautiful splashes of colors from other colorists on my news feed and all I had with me were blues and blacks. Ugh!

Good thing I posted my work-in-progress after two days of not touching it and received much needed prompts to finish it from colorist friends. After I got started on my second wind on this and didn't almost want to stop until I was done. Two days later I encountered this, a badly broken pencil. It happened as I was sharpening it on my stand-up pencil sharpener when the entire thing toppled on the floor with the pencil as the lone casualty. I thought it was the Ultramarine color, turned out to be Violet Blue.

This made me decide to get a new set of Prismas. Someone even offered to give me her Ultramarine which she hasn't used from her set. Anyway, it's a good thing I only had exactly four leaves left to complete this image. I finally finished it using only the tinier half with the coloring tip on hand.

Broken pencil, broken heart.

The finished work! Many thanks to my online colorist friends from Coloring Books for Adults-Philippines whom I had yet to meet then. We always helped each other go on with our works whenever we lose the inspiration or energy to complete them.

The monochromatic color scheme made me appreciate doing each critter all the more since my mind's eye was focused on the color values this time rather than splashing them with colors.

I couldn't seem to bring out the colors I wanted on the owl's feet. I don't know if it was the paper or the pencils that produced the greyish tone. I meant some parts to be black, others blue, but it kept coming out as grey.

I enjoyed having introduced the moon as the source of light of this picture.