Apologies for the lag between mural posts; I was at Spectrum Live! in Kansas City two weekends ago and then WonderFest in Louisville, Kentucky this last weekend. Nevertheless, even with my hectic travel schedule I refined more of the Pleistocene mural. Now that I am back home until Comic-Con International in July, you’ll be seeing much greater progress with each passing week. My goal is to finish this second mural within a month. I would love to have it done in time for the two murals to be installed at Elephant Odyssey in the San Diego Zoo by Comic-Con.
Here you can see the bobcat and desert tortoise both taking shape.
I have started to “sculpt” the tortoise with paint.
These two animals are now close to being finished.
I made the huge short-faced bear larger than I had in my original lay-in to make it more in proportion to the animals around it.
Once I was happy with its proportions, I began to refine it and pay more careful attention to its anatomy.
The bear is now pretty close to being finished. I can see the influences of both Bob Kuhn and Frank Frazetta in this little painting. And isn’t this a nice little color scheme?
The teratorn‘s size needed some adjusting, so I quickly laid in the outline of a larger bird over my first lay-in.
The same size-adjusting was needed for the capybaras, except that they needed to be smaller. I hacked away at their size with a larger brush and then began to indicate some bits of natural capybara behavior as well.
I reduced the size of the distant timber wolf silhouettes, then began to refine both the giant cave lion (one and a half times the size of a modern tiger) and the pronghorn antelopes.
I decided that two profiles near each other (the cave lion and the short-faced bear) was one too many, so I turned the lion’s head a bit toward the viewer (that would be you). That helped to make the lion’s pose less stiff and formal. I quickly changed the color and value of the pronghorns’ coats, making them their more typical butterscotch/caramel color.
The lion is pretty much finished but the pronghorns need work, as, obviously, so do the timber wolves.
The California condor is now fairly completed…
…as is the gray fox. I found that pointillism was a good solution for indicating the gray fox’s grizzled coat.
I am getting very excited as this picture progresses!
Next: Dog Family – Coyote, Dire Wolves & Timber Wolves