"Three Cats on Stairs" portrait in progress 11 - Flat brown comes to life

Colored pencil details on the wooden moldings on each step really brought them to life.

At the very beginning I made an underpainting for the basic shapes of the staircase on pale grey paper: the sides of the stairs with grey watercolor, the shadow under each stair tread with grey wash, and brown for the wooden molding on the front of each step. The moldings were just flat brown, as you see on the left (BEFORE). Then I added highlights and shadow along the length of each molding with colored pencil. (AFTER)

That gives them their 3-dimensional shape, and makes them much more interesting in the composition.

Like everything else about this composition, each molding had to be larger than the one above it (farther away up the staircase).

The moldings were somewhat tedious, but easy to do, much easier than the details of the cats. And very satisfying. I really liked the way those flat brown strips I’ve been looking at for days, suddenly popped into the rich look of wooden moldings.

Doing the moldings was more time-consuming than I expected. But the brown underpainting saved me a lot of work. It would have taken even longer without that brown base, to completely cover the light grey paper with cream, beige, orange, and brown pencils.

COLORS I USED:

For the highlights I used (starting with the lightest): cream, beige, yellow-orange, mauve, and a touch of darker orange, blending them together as I went. For the shadows I used (starting with the lightest): rust-brown, mahogany brown, chocolate, and dark blackish-brown.

Carefully blending those together down the length of the molding with light brown and rust-brown.

For the dark shadow under each “fold” of the molding I used the straight edge of a t-square to get a perfectly straight line with my darkest brown, then “feathered” it with mahogany brown and chocolate.

“Three Cats on Stairs”

(Grace, Bonnie, and Morgan)

Commissioned by Tammy Cunningham.

🎨 Prismacolor pencil and watercolor on “Flannel Grey” Canson Mi-Teintes paper. 20 x 26 inches.