Well, yes, there has been a considerable amount of rain in the interim – punctuated with bursts of credibly summery sunshine (some of them approaching whole afternoons in duration, miraculously…) – so, with a certain amount of self-marshalling and the kindly (mainly hot-beverage and regular-meal-shaped) ministrations of Marvellous Dave, I have managed to complete the successor pieces to my Leopard character sheet with enough of a time buffer to also pack for the Anglia Ruskin Illustration Summer School (just…).
Happily, of the three pieces I, alternately, sheltered from sheeting horizontal rain and successfully avoided back-breaking ‘gardening’ (actually equates to fairly major earthworks at our place at the moment) to conjure into being, the last – a double page spread illustration – seems to rather neatly fit this week’s Illustration Friday topic: show me a jungle creature character (of the big cat ilk – but not necessarily a stripy one, despite famous precedent…) that doesn’t like to bounce exuberantly through long grass…!
Sketching out the composition to accommodate (a small amount of) text. I allowed myself the use of fine liners to define the outlines for tracing on the lightbox, which I think is allowed…
Watercolour and pencil on (unstretched – gah!) Bockingford paper
And, see – no fine liners!
I was rather pleased with this piece upon finishing, but can already see many flaws in the execution and final result that weren’t immediately obvious with the still-drying image inches from my nose: insufficient shading to provide depth for the tumbling panther; uneven tone caused by crinkly, unstretched paper buckling under the wash; general lack of intensity in the colours… I could go on, probably for quite some time, but I have a train to catch in a couple of hours and still haven’t packed so much as a pencil (I did say ‘just’ in time…!).
Thanks for stopping by 🙂 If you have an idle moment, please do check out some of the other fantastic pieces gathering on the Illustration Friday page this week – there are some truly awesome talents out there!
AP x.
amanda's pencil post 
Ooh I didn’t know Anglia Ruskin did summer schools! I have been considering trying to get onto the masters course, but at £7500 its a bit of a scary prospect!! I would love to hear how the course goes, and might sign up for one myself next year!
good job! I like the feet of the cats they’re so cute 🙂
Thank you so much! 🙂
It’s amazing,love the characters,colors and the movement:)
Ah, thank you so much – I’m glad you like the characters 🙂 x
Wow. The monkey is pretty cool but I’m all about those gorgeous cats! Such coats! Such joy! Such catness. And the feet. Aaaah, love the feet. And the butterflies.
Thank you so much, Cindy! Too kind, as usual 🙂 The cats were fun to draw, but my husband reckoned the panther was perhaps a little too Jungle Book… What I am most proud of in this piece is having resisted the black fine liners (geez, that was a struggle!!), although I discovered exactly how tricky it is to achieve line definition on a completely black animal and avoid all his somersaulting limbs melding into one black/brown splodge…