After an involuntary six month hiatus I have finally been able to pick up painting again, and have since finished one small painting, one big one, have started a new large one, and have generally been working toward producing a pdf file that I can send to publishers as a sample of the book that should persuade them to publish it. I need to do just one additional illustration for the marblebill page, one that will probably show a dawn scene with screeching marblebills outlined against the sky.
I decided to show you one such additional illustration, showing a species of grouillard related to the one on the Furaha site.
 |
| Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk |
And here it is. As you can see, it has a banded colour pattern that just screams
'Here I am!' to any animal with a decent vision. Remember that the grouillard you are familiar with (
Oructator olidus) was black and brightly red, so it wasn't exactly given to camouflage either. These warning colours, because that is what they are, tell other animals not to fool around with a grouillard: except for its extremely nauseating and somewhat toxic spit, the animals taste extraordinarily awful. Young predators may bite into a grouillard once, and that grouillard will not live to tell about the experience. But the predator will, and will not bother another grouillard for a long time, if ever.
So there you are. It was fun painting the mossy fungoid thingy on the branch. I still have no good notion of what all the various brushes in Corel Painter 12 can do, my favourite painting software. When I find a better fungoid-producing bbrush, I may erase this one and do it again. So far I set out to copy my usual method of working in oils as closely as possible. That seems to work nicely, so it is time to see what else I can do with this box of tricks.
