chinchilla

[johncomic]

My 40^th acrylic painting is a chinchilla (as I hope is apparent). I did it back in August, but it was a birthday gift so I couldn't show it publicly til my friend saw it [so as not to spoil the surprise, eh]. I learned a few things while working on this one:

• my ability to handle acrylic paint technically is a bit more advanced than I consciously realized — I was able to do some things here that I didn't know I could.
• for the first time, I tried using a fair bit of drybrush in acrylic. It's a technique I don't hear discussed very often with acrylics, but I found that it came in handy here.
• so many times I have read that it's not a good idea to fuss with fiddly little things in a painting — but for this painting I felt free to ignore that advice, because I knew what final look I was aiming at.
• I noticed in my reference photo that the chinchilla had both white and black whiskers, so I painted on some white ones and black ones. But then I immediately saw that they jumped out, glaring unnaturally. So I went over them with washes til I ended up with light gray and dark gray whiskers instead, and that looked better. This was a good lesson in paying closer attention to actual colours and values, to see what you see instead of what you think you see.