Starting My Portrait of Taz

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Last time, I showed you the photo of Taz that my friend Mark sent me to use as reference. He had caught Taz in the process of licking his face and loved his expression; he said it was "pure Taz". So we agreed I would just copy that photo. Whenever I start a painting, I first make a sketch on the canvas with pastel. Some artists use charcoal, but whenever you paint over a dry medium like charcoal or pastel, it picks up some of the powdered pigment and mixes it into the paint, so the black pigment of charcoal can give colors a grey cast (this can make someone look a little bit dead when it happens to a skintone!). What I like to do is pick out a color that plays a major role in the color scheme of the picture, so in this case, I used a brown color to do the drawing. I guess properly, I should have taken a picture with just the sketch, but I didn't think to do it until I started laying in color, so here's what it looked like with the background color blocked in. The pipe above Taz wasn't green, of course, but I was more interested in getting the correct shape and placement than the exact color, since this was the first of many layers. It wasn't really necessary to mix up a grey color just to paint one thin shape.