Yesterday I shared a closeup of Baxter’s head with just a few of the many pencil colors I’m using to capture Baxter’s coat color. Here are the swatches I made to guide me on how the different colors look on this “moonstone” paper.
I studied many of Brian and Frank’s photos of Baxter to understand the color of his coat.
It’s not exactly yellow, and it’s not exactly red,
it’s not blonde, nor is it rust.
It’s golden, the color of dry grass in summer.
Frank took a couple shots of Baxter laying on their dry lawn this summer and pointed that out. And parts of his coat have grey and brown — like the dark “mask” on his forehead. So that required many shades of light and dark mushroom-brown (brownish grey) shading into golds and golden browns, with touches of mauve-grey, as well as blue-grey in a few shadowed places.
As I commented yesterday when I shared the close-up: so many interesting colors in Baxter’s coat!
I'm working on Baxter’s body adding colored pencil detail. That’s still just the underpainting on the right foreleg.
