Strength

This is my third independently designed project. I was thinking about building my portfolio, so I wanted to create something more realistic. I was inspired by my duck stamp project I made in 2D design last year. This was really the close to realism I have done so far, although it had impressionistic attributes as well. I wanted to make an animal, and many of my past work has been in portrait form.

I started out by looking at pictures of different animals, eventually deciding on a bear because it is my favorite animal. I looked at multiple different reference photos and sketched out a bear. I liked the idea of it being on its hind legs, but I still had a zoomed/cropped bear. I used water color and began to paint the bear. I started using different sized brushes, thinking I would add fine details this way. As i continued to work however, I used many different shades and colors to show the texture of the bears hair. This portrait ended up being much more impressionistic than i had planned, but I still like the way it turned out. Because of the bears dark colors, I wanted to set the background in a dark color. I wanted to make it look like a night sky, adding blues, greens, and purples.