Pet Portraits and Wildlife Art

I've started on the rock work! You can see how I am working on this stage by the half completed rock at the front. I worked from dark to light colours as they seemed to blend together better in this order and this area of the rock is to be quite shady so plenty of dark colours are used. As usual I draw the shapes of the areas out using my technique of 'does that touch that bit, is it darker than that last bit?' and so on. I go through all the colours I need in the rock, about 5 greys, small amounts of black, several blues and even brown then the light areas I blend with a white pencil but the darker areas I use a burnisher on as the white pencil will lighten the colours a lot. When I am satisfied the colours are correctly blended I may go back to add more shadows or use a stabilo white to give highlights as it goes over everything. It's a long way to go yet, this has taken several hours from yesterday evening plus I woke up yet again very early so decided to get on with a bit more. It was frosty outside which was a surprise, I hadn't realised it was so cold, my poor guinea pigs won't be very happy with me as I turned all the heating off in the shed, luckily they do have a thermal blanket at the door plus lots of nice warm bedding! I expect they'll need extra carrots in compensation!

I'll be back later to add those 7 blogs I feel deserving of the painting award, I was blog-hopping the internet last night and have decided on 5 already so I need to find 2 more and will add my list after that.