Coat Of Many Colours And Spots

The 'coat' connection came just now...

For light-hearted purely traditional doodling after some illustration work (more on that soon), I decided I wanted to draw on A3 paper exactly 101 dalmatians, because I thought the effect of all the spots together and not much colour otherwise would be interesting. But also because Dodie Smith's 1956 novel is one of my favourite books to come back to, as it is written in a very charming way. Of course the Disney film(s) is so well-known there's no way of not getting influenced by it, but I have tried to make it closer to the novel with the inclusion of the liver-spotted adults and such. I spread drawing this out over a few days and only pencilling and pen-ing a few at a time so I could ensure I was keeping count. I believe there is 101! The nature of how I drew it, wanting little pressure with it as possible, means the appearance of the dogs and how much concentration into them does vary quite a bit! Again, just a bit of fun that I finally decided I might as well upload here, along with the following piece.

Seeing spots...

Another one of my favourites that I'd been meaning to do a picture for is of the musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A coat of many colours splayed out was something I wanted to create. (Quite the contrast with the other pic.) I drew Joseph with curly hair as a nod to the Joseph that I went to see some years back now -- Lee Mead. I selected all the colours for the coat that are mentioned in one of the songs, which meant looking up various colour codes to get the best accuracy I could (at least with how I see the colours). I didn't actually look up references of how the coat generally looks in the stageshows; I just went with the flow. As ever I really like the lift that adding a texture gives to the final piece. It's fun to experiment with drawing humans in different ways when I don't draw them generally as much as animals. I'm pleased to have finally given this colourful coat image a go! EDIT: made a few minor changes since first posting this picture.

Thanks for looking.