I sketch using a General's Cedar 2B pencil, on a Bienfang drawing tablet 14" by 20", which is smaller than the finished pice. I do this because I tend to crowd my scenes out to the edges and this gives me a safety margin in the final piece.
The subject matter for this illustration was my daughter Nathalie's best friend Lia and her family. Lia an dNathalie have been friends since they were a few months old, and at the time I am painting this, both kids are ten and a half or so. I don't have many friends that I have been close to for more than a decade so I count their friendship as pretty special.
So this picture had to be something special too. I start with the idea of Cutie & Lia being the center piece in a fantasy family card game, with Lia as a faery an dmom and dad as gnomes. When I paint for kids I like to include references to the child without attempting to represent the child in portraiture. I took a reference photo of Cutie, however and tried to capture as exactly as I could the markings that make her Cutie and not just any old cat.
Michael is a paediatrician so he sports a stethoscope and bears a caduceus biker patch, while Nina is a landscape designer and has her bag of design tools beside her. In the background is a fantasy tree house, and the whole is set in a magical misty forest glen, with a tree stump as a card table.
This picture is chock full of details which is a recipe for art porridge. Only by creating an aesthetic balance between focus areas and receding areas, between highlights and shadows will I create a painting, and not a jigsaw puzzle. So while I am sketching in greys, I am thinking in color and planning in cinemascope.