![]() The trees were mostly created using a vertical (up/down) zigzag line. Next item to discuss are the trees and shore line. I will discuss this further and provide a lot more pictures in a later segment. When I started filling in the mountains I used very short zigzag types of strokes to give a varied texture. When I drew the mountains onto the gun stock, I just left them in silhouette form, so I only drew in the top peak edge. Looking at the sketch, you can see that I drew in some basic mountains with a few lines to indicate cracks, peaks, etc. Now I’m going to discuss the background a bit.įirst item is the mountain. I added a cast shadow from the eagle’s body onto the branch and toned it an overall medium brown or tan color. This gave the area that ‘tree bark’ look to it. I turned the shading tip on edge to draw in a lot of thin lines of assorted length down the branch. In this photo I’ve got the tree branch pretty well-defined. I was able to use the shader to finish contouring the head. I’m not sure I could have made a regular writing tip work as the eye so small. Switching to a needle point pen tip was necessary to work on the eye. I wanted shadows under the beak, but they needed to be light enough that it didn’t look like dark feathers. Working on the head required that I use my micro shading tip on very low heat. Eventually I just gave most of them a medium tan tone as I wanted to move onto the head. I started working on the lower wing feathers darkening them up a lot. I’m going to group the progress photos a little differently in this section, so I can discuss the artwork a little easier.įirst let’s see what I did with the eagle. Note that I’m not going to show any of the mountain formation in this section as I will have many photographs of that later.Īs you can see in this next stopping point the eagle’s head is done, the shore line is well-formed and a little more work has been done on the mountain. I worry that if I don’t then I will smear or smudge the pencil marks and that could make it difficult to shade it later. I almost always outline my work so I can erase the pencil marks. Basically I got the outline done and a tiny bit of one mountain started. In this first stopping point I haven’t gotten very far along. FIRST STOPPING POINT First stopping point And, yes, my goal is to one day add video via youtube, but that is still a down-the-road project as I can barely keep up with things as they are. I then use still shots taken from the video recording to show the progress that lead up to the stopping point. ![]() I take a photograph of the artwork’s progress when I have a stopping point. Once I finished the sketch, I sent it to the customer for approval and, after receiving the okay, I went to work.Ī quick note about the progress photos. Everything else fell into place after that. Since I wanted the eagle to be a large as it could be and still fit, that meant it had to be placed at the butt end of the gun stock. The sketch came together very quickly, as the only real thing in question was where to place the eagle. This allowed me to sketch out ideas and determine what needed to go where based on how it fit. Using a large piece of newsprint paper, I traced an outline of the gun stock onto it. Grain lines can sometimes create some unpredictable and usually unwanted effects when wood burning. The rest of the stock was pretty uniform in color, but it did have a lot of tight grain lines in it. I knew right away it would be a perfect spot for the lake. The bottom of the stock had a naturally pale section that reminded me of a pond with ripples going through it. This is a picture of the bare gun stock sanded down and ready to receive artwork. You can watch a timelapse YouTube video of this artwork being created. In this blog I will discuss the artwork and show its progress of creation. I knew that my customer loved bald eagles, so I was hopeful that he would like this concept. On one side I created a cougar stalking deer scene and on the other side I created this Eagle by a mountain lake. As mentioned in my Cougar stalking Deer gun stock blog, this last summer I received a commission to burn “something outdoorsy” onto a gun stock.
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