Snow Leopard
Watercolor /
Animals
My reference materials for this painting were a succession of photographs
I'd taken at a zoo. I do not ever project photographs as a basis for my
paintings, so instead these were placed by my side while I created the painting
from scratch. Before I began, I created rough initial sketches
to determine my basic composition, done to a fraction of the exact dimensions
of the watercolor paper.
When it came time to start the actual painting,
very little sketching was done underneath, with most of the image painted directly
onto the paper.
My initial step was to create a soft snowflake effect in the background, accomplished
by spraying water onto the wet pigments of the sky.
My overall goal was to capture the look
of a snow leopard venturing out from behind a dark cliff and onto
a snowy scene. As a traditional transparent watercolor,
the white shown is the white of the paper.
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