The Red Junglefowl

The only customer Cravings, Shangri La that time I took out my coloring materials and got lost in my work.

My husband let me tag along with him that one Friday afternoon in September. I didn't usually do that but that day I wanted to get out of the house for some reason. I chose to bring with me Millie Marotta's Animal Kingdom. As any colorista's over-coffee-coloring (OCC) story would have it I brought out my coloring stuff and made the table my working desk for two solid hours while I waited for my husband's call signaling that his meeting was over.

I used Colleen colored pencils on "Bossing"

A couple more days later I finished "Bossing" which earned more than 500 likes in the international page of Coloring Books for Adults in Facebook. Needless to say I was surprised.

The most peculiar thing I did in coloring this cockerel was how I worked on the feathers. I moved along the index of colors represented by different pencils as I shaded each tiny detail of each single feather to further achieve the 3D look I was after. That, even before I began shading the entire feather. Do you get what I mean? I think you do.

I used a peg for this image. I forget now what online page I lifted the photo from so I'm not going to share it here because I can't attribute it accordingly. Anyhow, that's to tell you that I didn't imagine the colors. I'm not very creative with colors so I often mimic nature when assigning hues for my pictures.

The hardest color for me to achieve was the maroon hue at the bottom of the wing. I didn't have that in my palette, yet I couldn't just leave it out in since I grew up seeing fighting cocks in my hometown in Batangas, and that is a signature color of most of them.

I blended two Colleen shades from my 785 set, brown and red, until I achieved this striking maroon. I'm quite happy with the end result.

I guess many were, too, after seeing them on their Facebook news feeds and clicking the Like button. Other members of adult coloring groups wished they could frame this and put it up in their kitchen. My husband thought of printing it on a t-shirt to gift to my grandfather who owns a cockpit arena in Marinduque. He'll receive it as our Christmas gift.

In the recent International Book Fair held in Manila I came across a book that says the more precise name for this cockerel is red junglefowl. I'm glad I took note of that so I could use it for the title of this blog and help share information. I didn't know that myself until then.