Critters on Bicycles - Jonathan the Mountain Goat

Another suggestion from blogger I follow!

Posting this a little late as I didn't get it done until late... 

Jonathan the Mountain Goat rides his Specialized Roubaix road bike all around the Palouse. 

Because Jonathan had inquired about how long these take... I though I'd try and remember to take a few process shots... 

Usually I do a few quick simple sketches - to get the body position and bike sorted out in my head, and maybe a sketch of the animal or at least the animal's head on it's own to nail down the key features that will make it read as that particular animal. At this point I've been drawing critters on bikes for 24 days straight and I was feeling pretty confident that I had the idea in my head, so I went straight to pencilling in the Critters on Bicycles 2022 Sketchbook! and I got the bike position wrong and the horns were veering off the page, so I erased it ALL and started over again. 

Once the pencilling is all in, I do a quick sketch outline of everything with a very fine rapidograph pen (3x0/.25mm). I also added in a background for this one. 

I don't always do this... but I through it would be much easier to do the background as mostly washes, and do them first, so I painted in some blocking fluid on the foreground stuff, so I could wash right over it and everything I wanted for the foreground would stay fresh and white.  

I know some people just do pencils and then just colour from there... but my pencils tend to be VERY MESSY - they would definitely show through colour and I'd have a hard time remembering WHICH pencil line to follow... so I do this quick fine "best fit" line and erase all those messy, messy scratches all over the page. 

Then I worked on some of the 40K Challenge pictures while that all dried. I came back to these a few times while waiting for stuff to dry on the Mountain Goat. 

Blocking fluid thoroughly dry, I washed in a few colours that weren't touching each other, then waited for them to dry... 

Background done, I peeled off the blocking fluid. 

Next I would start in on the foreground colours, and then finally do the black outlines again. I meant to take a picture of the foreground colours being done before the black outlines are inked back in... but I forgot. Only as I got to this point I thought, I should look at a clock and see how long this takes. From starting in on foreground colours and final outline inking, took me about 2 hours.... Then there was taking pictures, editing, typing all this... 

Onto TODAY's drawing!