Hi Steemians :)

Today for art discord challenge, "Bald & Beautiful With A Twist," I did a simple painting with gouaches with a limited palette. Topic-wise, I decided to do a hairless guinea pig. Originally I wanted to go for Sphynx cat, but somebody else beat me to it! Darn it! 😁

Here's my final result - I'll show my progress (finally, I know! It's about time haha) to show how I achieved this. Perhaps it will help somebody.

This limited palette I'm using is called Zorn Palette, it consists just two colors, red and yellow ochre. Ivory black acts like a blue color in this wheel. It's really a fun palette to play with because it teaches you two things. One, optical illusion - with such a warm scheme any "grey" colors will appear cool and blue. Two, you don't need all colors to pull it off. Not everything is high in saturation. This is one of many methods of achieving color harmony. Try it out!

Anyways, here's my progress ~

Stage 1: I collected few references and drew my own guinea pig. Once I felt satisfied, I move on to the painting stage...

Stage 2: Started filling in the red background - mostly so that I won't have a pure white background to interrupt my ability to judge the colors and values when I start painting the guinea pig.

Stage 3: The light and dark areas have been established so I could make sure the contrast is decent.

Stage 4: Started filling the mid-tone and the rest in. The line where light and shade meets is still rough....

Stage 5: So I smoothed them out. Yup, it felt much better. Started adding semi-cool colors to enhance the warmth. Plus to show that guinea pigs have blue veins too. ;) Also added the highlights.

Stage 6: Detailed it up some more. Darkened some areas to give it extra 3d feeling. To give it extra depth, I softened up some edges and lightened up the red circle at the bottom so it could be more integrated with the white background. While it's a simple painting, I felt happy with the result so I signed it and called it done.

I hope you've enjoyed my progress and as always, please feel free to leave feedback. I strive to improve my future articles for you! Also if you have any questions - please feel free to ask.

Thank you so much for reading and cheers!
Dm7