Lately I have been working on a couple pet commissions. One is a Siberian cat and I will be starting an English Bulldog very soon. Just thought you might see my day to day work on the Siberian cat portrait. This is my sketch for the portrait, I tried to get as much detail as I could, because winging fur like this is really annoying, and the painting went by a lot smoother because of going the extra distance with the drawing. Next I laid in the background colors, keeping in mind where the lights and darks would be on the cat, I put a light blue next to the portions that were darker in the cat and a more mid-range blue next to the highlights of the fur. I like to lay in the darks when I do the background, so I can blur them a bit. The next day I put another layer of deep dark color and filled in more of the shadow fur so I could blend it easier. I don't concern myself too much with keeping it too crisp, as I plan to do another layer over everything anyway. ...
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