Snowy Owl Finished

Now that is one fluffy (and probably cozy) snowy owl.  Progress is slowly being made, I learn a little more about gouache each time I paint with it.

I started with a preliminary wash of watercolor across the paper, to set the mood and give me a background that wasn't blinding white.  (Blank white is intimidating to paint on, and makes it harder to see the real hue and value of your first layers, which makes eyeballing, er, planning your painting a little more difficult.)  I laid the very first layer of the owl in with watercolor as well, getting an idea of how I wanted to put the gouache down.  With the watercolor as my guide, I divided the base colors of the owl into zones, outlined them in my first layer of gouache (kind of like paint-by-numbers) and then filled them in with the second layer.  I laid a third brighter gouache layer over the base layer, and the fourth and fifth layers blurred together as I diffused the owl's outer feathers, adjusted the lighting, added the stripes, and covered up the remnants of the previous layers.

The GIF I created by following the extremely handy and hitherto unknown Photoshop technique demonstrated by illustrator Howard Lyon over here.  It centers your process images and makes the GIF animation a lot nicer.