Why did I pick Stripes

I love painting animals.  They are all so unique and beautiful.  I get and idea in my mind and it fills up my head until I have a  painting.  I will search photo purchase sites and purchase just the right line in the animal, just the right type of background, every angle meets my approval.  I know what the painting looks like in my head I only have to get it on canvas.  So it really should come as no surprise to me when I'm shaking my head back and forth saying to myself, "Why did I pick another animal with stripes?"

In this Tiger painting I have a white and gray cat with black stripes.  I rarely paint with anything but oils so I have a problem with wet paint and putting different colors next to each other to make fur stripes.  I laid in all the black stripes first with linseed oil being careful to follow my drawing. I let the paint set up a bit so it would be a little more stable when I added the whites and gray of the rest of the fur.  Too much brush work between stripes and all I have is a big mess and I've lost the drawing besides. I think that's why I go crazy painting stripes.

 I use a brush I buy from a portrait workshop teacher to get the feeling of fur right from the start. He calls these Chinese hair brushes and I've never been able to find them except from him. I have many, many of these, (someday we will talk about my brush addiction), and find if one of them isn't working I can get another one out and try that one.

Here you can see the black stripes are on and I am adding the white and gray over the stripes to make the fur.  

I was really happy with this so far.  I had the face on and the eyes somehow appeared to have color even though they were black and gray. I could see from my photo that the stripes fit the muscles of the cat and I had good shadows on the side.  The whisker area is always a little problematic for me, I don't want it to look like spots painted on but I was going to give myself time to work on that.

If you have a special technique for painting stripes or spots on animals please post here in the comment section or send me to your blog or website so I can have a new take on what is probably a common problem for artists.

Thanks for looking at my blog about painting, creating and other things so far.  I will post more pictures of this one getting done in a few days and hope you check out my Etsy site. Remember the first person to be able to tell me what painting won the Gamblin paint company's Torrit Gray art contest the year I entered this will win a small print of this painting.

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