Movie Jurasic Park (1993) made dinosaurs famous. Everyone who have seen the movie, remember fierce Velociraptors that roamed in ruins of the park. Movie Velociraptors were 4 times larger than real would have been.

If this movie would be in production now, Velociraptors would not become stars of this film. They would not be scary enough. Now we know that they did not at all look like movies Velociraptors. Real Velociraptors had feathers, wings and primaries on their legs too. They had long feathered tail too. They were likely flightles even if their ancestors could fly.

Painting is 10″ x 20″.

Work in progress images:

Four days long workshop was held 10.-13.6. in Wolverhampton, England. Place and other arrangements were done by custom paint studio. Garage was emptied and a long table placed in centre for students. We had to bring only our notebooks and pencils, all other supplies were provided.

Our first day gave us huge amount of information. After introduces we got great three hours lesson of colour buffer method, elements of photorealism and how our brain sees things, colour and lightness. After theory, we were given the horse picture we were supposed to paint during the workshop. When starting photorealistic painting style it is almost must to practice by copying photograpfs. Latter when caustics, radiosity, reflectivity and other phenomenons come familiar, you can start painting more based your imagination.

Everyone got one colour from background that they had to mix. Now hue, saturation and value had to be exactly same than in our reference picture. It took time to make correct paint. My paint needed 19 corrections before gap between original colour and paint colour was invisible.

After paints were mixed we had to do famous “dot of the death” exercise. We had to hide black dot painted in the middle of neutral brown coloured paint. The challenge was that we had to use paints directly from bottles. Mixing paint on the board! During this project we got clearer idea how this buffer colour theory works.

Slowly hiding the black spot with paint

After mixing paint and doing dot exercise it was time to start our main project: horse. During first evening we painted foreground with lots of details and background with many subtle colour changes. Fine tuning of hue and saturation was again done mostly with paints directly out of bottle.

Mixing paints on the board!

Next couple of days we focused in painting different surface structures and shadowing. Everything was done with thin paint layers that were manipulated with erasers, surgical blades or even with fingers. Occasionally I found out that some things that I had painted, did not work, and I had to erase paint of and start again.

During first part of the last day we painted hair with split frisket method. I had bad problems with the glue of frisket film. Even if I rubbed frisked against my skin, it still picked up some paint from my painting. Correcting exposed white board dots took long time. No one made their horse ready, but after the lessons we now know how to do it at home.

After lunch Dru showed us how to paint feathers and scales. We had also time for lots of questions. Last couple of hours every one tried to paint their horses as ready as possible.

Review:

Our daily painting time was roughly 10 hours. Theaching was exelent and easy to follow. This time there were only 5 students so we got all help and support we needed. As American Dru praised us a bit too much sometimes, but he managed well to support us when we struggled with our paintings. Many of the airbrushing techniques were familiar to me, but there was lots of new variations and tricks. More precise colour mixing skill will be very usefull for me.

The only thing I would have wanted more to this workshop would have been one more day spent entirely painting tricky things like eyes, snout of animals, horn structures and other similar things. This would have given some confidence even if we got all information needed during lessons.

During the workshop we had new Iwata custom micron airbrushes that worked fine and proved to be excellent. Paints we used were new Createx illustration colours. They seemed a bit better than Holbein paints I have used.

My hotel was Premier in Wallsall Bentley 3 mails away. It had very quiet rooms and good restaurant.

Thanks for Dru Blair for all the new knowledge and skills I got, Custom pait studio for organizing this workshop and all fellow students who shared this experience with me.

Ähtäri Zoo has its 40 years celebration this year. New buildings are being built, information boards remade and park cleaned. My part is to make together with Toteemi oy new information boards for the zoo. One third is already ready and largest two boards are almost ready.

I had a change to visit this zoo during weekend. It was interesting to see how ready boards looked in their places. I also had a good change to take reference pictures for those boards that I will make latter this year. Animals were busy even if it was very cold during mornings. Young bears were already awake and clamming behind the steel door. When the doors were opened they ran and crawl in to the soft snow. It was funny to watch! Most amazing experience was the wolves. They howled during dawn. Listeners got goose pumps because the sound.

This large board will be in aviary.

This test painting is done with acrylics and cosmetic mica. I tested castings with angles (wings) and painting between layers (legs). Latter I have sanded edges down and polished the piece. Next works will be larger and more complex.