The Leopard from Animorphia

When I got to this page in Anirmorphia by Kerby Rosanes I was already entertaining thoughts on enlarging the pieces before coloring them. I came across this digital printing shop inside the University of the Philippines (YZA Colored Digital Printing) Diliman, Quezon City through an artist friend who said they can duplicate my works exactly like the original for framing. That's good since I didn't want to remove the seams of my coloring books just to frame a page or two.

Anyway, to continue my story, I was done coloring the head of this leopard when I noticed that some spots were more faded thatn the others because I unconsciously colored on them with my colored pencils. I used Colleen pencils here by the way. So without thinking that I might ruin it I worked black ink over a spot or two and ruined it.

My first attempt on the leopard. It's a good thing this was an enlarged copy from the book. The book image is safely intact. Whew!

For this new image I left the jaw white since almost all the photo references of leopards I looked at had white areas on their faces.

The following day I had another enlarged print made. I realized then that the shop digitally fixes the image to make it look like a flawless (no seam showing) image on the printed page, that's very professional of them. It took me another two days to complete this one. I was very careful not to color on top any spot so that I would still have dark spots in the end. I kept my black marker pens as far away from my work area as possible. No more retouching with ink as far as I'm concerned.

For the background I simply experimented with oil pastel, dark yellow and black. Tissue came in handy, that's what I used to spread the medium around.

I had it framed weeks later, quite happy with how it turned out.