Wild times in the studio

Recently, I was working on a writing project that involved describing how it feels to be a wolf, so that seems to be what inspired this project. After working out a sketch of a profile of canis lupus, I transferred it to a grayish blue fabric with some texture. The lines are painted with black gesso to get a matte finish. The photo below makes the gray look neutral, but it’s fairly blue as seen above.

The fabric is pinned to 1/2 inch thick foam core, by the way. It makes a wonderful portable work surface that can be put on an easel, laid flat, pinned up on the design wall, whatever. I put a paper cutout around the silhouette of the wolf because the plan was for the background to be a light value. Then I started pinning on patches of fabric in somewhat realistic, but intensified colors.

Some of these fabrics had to be switched out later, but the only way to know is to try them out. One of the big questions was how much of the line work to cover up vs. cutting the patches so that it showed. I tried not to get too hung up on it. The first black fabric I tried was too busy, but this one has just a suggestion of dark gray swishes, which worked well.

The finished piece will be in my next post, hope you like him so far.