New art print in progress

Hello folks!

I wanted to show you a sneak peek of a new art print Josh has been working on. This one will join the series of prints with the Horned Owl, Grackle and Robin he has made already. He had made a crow art print that was a limited edition only, but it was so popular it ran out of stock really fast and people have been asking for another crow ever since! So he decided to make a Raven poster next :) 

It's not done yet, as comics and other projects have temporarily taken priority, but here's a little taste of what it will look like! 

First he drew a few ravens from reference pictures, to decide which angle he wanted, which features he could show best, etc:

#4 won, and he then made a bigger sketch trying to decide how much of the bird to show within the space he has:

Finally, here's the work in progress! You can see he's not painting it all at once, but rather taking his time with details on certain sections:

This painting is 16x20cm, and he's using gouache for it, as he does most of his comics. Gouache is very nice because it is water-soluble, so you can make nice effects similar to watercolour, but it is more opaque than watercolour and therefore you can layer it nicely to show details like this raven's head feathers.

Once he's done painting, he will have to decide which colour the background should be to best complement the bird, which can take a long time because so many options are tempting!

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As a side note, the pandemic has had such a big effect on the postal services that he decided to temporarily close the False Knees online store. This way, he is also better able to focus on comics and other projects! So hopefully, this one will be finished by the time he reopens it :) 

We hope you're all well and safe! Have a great weekend!