The Ram

At first I was uneasy doodling four or five images on this Ram spread from Kerby Rosanes' Animorphia. I had cold feet, I didn't want to ruin my coloring book. When I stepped back and realized that it could actually work I went on the finish the entire horn to my right. I did a mix of the little critter-like creatures and zen doodling for its design. Halfway through the morning I made a similar image on the right horn, and before the day was over I was done doodling!

For outlining the pencil drawings I used Dong-A Hexaplus Fineliner 0.4 mm black, and Artline 853 Fine Overhead Projection Marker. I knew I wasn't going to color them using wet tools so I was confident the inks would hold.

For doing the background the same afternoon I used oil pastel, it was the second background project I did in this book. I used two different shades of blue at first, I colored the entire spread with the lighter one then only half with the darker one. In the photo below most of the darker blue was already covered by black. For some reason I found myself shading higher and higher with the black to achieve the gradual fade effect. I'm not sure I was able to do that 100% but I'm quite satisfied when I stopped at this. My family also was scheduled to leave in a few minutes to watch Hotel Transylvania the movie so I called it a day.

I did this background for an entire afternoon using oil pastels spread with tissue paper. I would apply lightly on the paper and watch it closely as I rub it. I wanted it to come out soft and even so I was very careful not to leave any blooming. The tissue paper was efficient in helping me take care of that.

Doing the animal's fur was easy since this one was not in motion and all its muscles were relaxed. I just had to follow Kerby's line shadings except for the one on top of its nose. All the photo references I used showed that the hair growth in that area were horizontal. Kerby's lines were vertical. I followed the pegs.

The following day I got started with the colors and chose the bright ones to contrast with blue and black background. The story about the golden fleece kept coming to me so I looked up images of that online and decided to make the horn mostly gold by influence.

Every now and then I would take photos of my WIP to play with the contrasts and lighting in my phone's camera to see further what needs to be highlighted and deepened. I just love that I can do that. Because sometimes when I'm working too close on my piece I miss out seeing the bigger picture. The phone and certain photo apps help me with that.

Happy with my completed work I propped it on my wooden easel and set it on the table for this photo.

A close up on the headdress where I used glitter and metallic pens. So much fun to do!

This work, among all of my works, by far earned the biggest number of Likes in the international group Coloring Books for Adults with 1, 212 Likes. In less than 24 hours it had 1,000 likes already. That really is something memorable for a simple person like me.