uanpatrickhedges

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• Patrick Hedges
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• Wildlife Gallery 1
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This is a page that I will update as I work on more pieces. I'll keep the old ones, so the page will just get longer and longer and be a record of my more recent work with the most recent at the top.

I've recently added portraits to my repertoire. These are a couple of people we met in Africa, the first a guard at the temple complex of Karnak in Egypt and the second is Chief Chilicoti's Wife, from a village called Chilicoti in Malawi.

Soft pastels, 11" x 11"

 

Soft pastels 16" x 10"

Tasmanian Devil, miniature scratchboard and watercolour, shown actual size

Meerkats - Always Alert

Cobra - Always Alert

Sketching time again, another orangutan in 30 minutes.

Here's something different for me, a scratchboard and gel pen of a beetle. The gel pens were used to created the shiny wing covers and comprise removing the black ink and then coating in gold gel, with purple, red, blue, green and black stippled over the top, and silver gel to create the highlights. 5.5" x 4".

"Getting to know You", pastels 16" x 11"

Scratchboard of a Grizzly Bear, 16" x 12", coloured with watercolours

Elephant, Coloured Pencil on Colourfix paper, 3.5" x 5"

"Who's lunch is it anyway"? Giant tortoises and ladybird, 16" x 12"

Pastel on black velour

This is a miniature, shown at life size, so my eye glasses got a workout. It was hard to get detail in at the size I did this at, but it was fun trying it out. It's a horse I saw at a wedding on a farm, and I was intrigued by the flies looking for moisture around the eye. Scratchboard and watercolour, 4" x 2.75"

Vicky, a Bornean Orangutan in Scratchboard and watercolour

Dung Beetle I saw in Kenya

Crowned Crane in scratchboard and watercolour

Back to sketching. These are some banded mongooses (or mongeese if you wish) that I spotted in Singapore Zoo

Here are a few more scratchboards (see explanations below)

"I've got my eye on you" Lion in the Cairo Zoo

"Trouble Ahead", spider's web and bee

It's a good idea to sketch as often as possible, even if it's from a photo. Better to go out into the real world and sketch from life, but I was at work with some odd moments, so I worked on this one in ballpoint biro

Back to having a go at scratchboard with a tiger's eye

This is a Rainbow Lorikeet in pastels. I've swapped it with another artist for a flower painting.

Trying something new, to me at least. This is a fur seal I saw on the Abel Tasman walking trail in New Zealand, done on black clayboard, or scratchboard, and then coloured in watercolours just to add a bit of life

Back to eyes. I'm currently working on a close up of a red tailed hawk's eye. I'm really trying to get that sinking look of a pupil that is deep in the eye, but that you know is covered with a reflective cornea. This has been achieved by using Rembrandt's black and Art Spectrum's pthalo blue

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I'm trying my black velour again. This is a gibbon.

At my last art show, I got a commission to paint a warthog. They are so ugly they are beautiful so I decided to paint a youngster looking at the adult, perhaps contemplating the changes it'll make, a bit like the opposite of a butterfly

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My most recent work has been this colourful gorilla. I wanted to do something different so I took a traditional portrait and went wild with colour. It's in soft pastels on colourfix paper, 11" x 8"

I've recently finished a soft pastel painting of meerkats. They are the most adorable creatures, very skitish, very sociable, very cute. With this piece, I put a few references together. The group in the background is supposed to look a little frightened of something, a predator like a snake or an eagle perhaps. The one to the left is the dominant protector that they all look to and this is the vision I was trying to convey.

I used sand coloured Art Spectrum Colourfix paper with a combination of Art Spectrum and Rembrandt soft pastel sticks, hard sticks and Conte pastel pencils. I like the pencils for putting detail in but I'm getting frustrated with them as a few seem to be broken all along the shaft. This is annoying and expensive and is forcing me to get more proficient at using the soft sticks.

I went for a fairly simple background and foreground as I didn't want to take the viewer's attention away from the meerkats too much. I also went with the rule of thirds for my composition, adding another element, that of it being natural to read a painting from left to right. This meant I really had to consider which way I was going to face the different meerkats so that the viewer's eye travels along the picture naturally. Maybe a bit too much development in the composition, but I believe a good composition gets your painting off on the correct foot.

My paper size is 16" x 12" (400mm x 300mm)