About a year ago I experimented with running an art Patreon (as opposed to my animal anatomy Patreon), but it didn’t really work out. I did create a few posts though, and I don’t want them to go to waste, so I’m going to share them now for free on this blog. Enjoy!

Cappuccino Tiger

The goal was to draw a relaxed tiger with toned-down colors inspired by a cappuccino. So first I prepared a couple of photos of lying tigers, and created some quick sketches. I used a wide brush here that allowed me to capture the form quickly. All these sketches are pretty quick, drawn without zooming.

Once I was properly warmed-up, I created my own sketch. First a small, loose one…

… and then its cleaned version:

After this, I added the basic colors, trying to use multiple shades of creamy brown.

Then I added the stripes…

… and a basic shading. Since I wanted to keep the background white, I decided to keep the shadows minimal.

I learned my lesson from the too-early rendering attempt in my black swan dragon, so this time I didn’t go straight to rendering, no matter how good the artwork looked already. Instead, I created a cleaner line art on top, prepared new mask, and painted the colors and shading once again—using the previous drawing as a reference.

Once I reproduced all the colors and shading in this more-detailed version, it was finally the time to start rendering. It was tricky, though—I kept drawing over the stripes. Another lesson learned—it’s good to render the stripes separately from the light & shadow, and only then move on to rendering everything.