These drawings are created by myself, so no reference is technically needed.
I wanted to explore the use of unnatural colours on illustrations of living things, so, without the aid of pencil, I used coloured pens to create these sort-of ‘portraits’ of a wolf, an owl, and a lion.
While the lion’s oranges are a little more relevant to the true colours of the king of the jungle, the wolf is mainly blue and the owl a mix of blues and greens.
I have always used purple to illustrate the basic features of each creature.
With this, I can feel different things about each animal.
The lion seems more natural than the others, mainly because the lion really is orange-ish in real life. But the purples hint at something new, something bordering on unnatural.
The owl is most definitely arbitrary, with purple acting as the darkest colours and blue and green sharing the features. This is mystical to me, and the cool colours contrasting the warm background of pink and red make me stare at it even longer than just a glance.
The wolf was the drawing with a theme of coldness. I picked the two coldest colours I had (blue and purple) and used that instead of arbitrary colours like the owl. White and blue tend to compliment each other well, as white can be interpreted as either a cool colour or a warm colour.
From this experience, I learned that arbitrary colours are fantastic to use on living things. It excites my brain when I recognize the features of the animal, and the unnatural colours are enjoyable to look at (as long as they don’t clash too hard.)
Looking at other artists who use arbitrary colours, I feel that they use them to create ethereal emotions and moods; the subject is unnatural, unseen in our real world, like a dreamscape or a vision into the artist’s intensively creative imagination.
I feel like with these three pen drawings I did the same or similar thing with creating unnatural but still beautiful creatures that can only be seen in the mind’s eye.
Siobhan's Art Corner 