Welcome to my 100th post, the Killer Whales. It is one of my first paintings on marine animals. I chose to do this painting to add to my collection of animal paintings. Boston Children’s Museum has called for proposals for All Things Animals from different artists and I plan to submit my animal collection. In addition to the Killer Whales (Orca), I also have The Majestic Cobra and Peacock – India’s National Bird. That makes my collection go as – reptile, bird and marine mammal.
Killer Whales displays two Orcas playing in the ocean. As I was researching about them to do my painting, I found some facts about killer whales:
- They are one of the world’s most powerful predators.
- Killer whales are actually dolphins, and are the biggest in the dolphin family.
- They have teeth that can grow up to 4 centimeters long.
- One family group can have up to 40 individuals.
I started off by painting the ocean background. The toughest part in this painting was to show the bubbles. They need to have a circular pattern and since they can be of all shapes and sizes, their shading needed additional attention to get the right feel. I learnt how to get the transparency effects on shiny and circular objects while doing these bubbles. The whales were actually quite simple. The teeth and shading of the bends on the white part of the body was the trickiest part. I needed to get the colors absolutely spot on.
The upper part of the background shows waves and it brings the light from the sun. So this needed some color variations and wavy effect. This took me a while to get the shading gradient on the blue color.
I hope you enjoy seeing the pictures on my Flickr Album (I can’t believe that I have written this a 100 times now 🙂 ). If it gets selected for All Things Animals, you could very well see my paintings at the Boston Children’s Museum between September 23, 2016 to November 26, 2016.
So, what do you think ?