A tiger… and blue shadows

I painted this tiger in the 97, when I was in high school. Actually the art teacher just sat in his desk and said us that we had to paint something whose word started with the “a”, the next class something with the “b” and so forth; so in the end I think he didn’t teach us nothing about art but yeah a lot about the alphabet LOL

You can bet that I preferred that way, the best education I could got was in my parent’s library, so I took advantage of the void to experiment by myself in painting. That tiger is based, if I’m not wrong in an encyclopedia’s photograph. Tigers and New York were my passion those years as motifs.

I didn’t want perfection but expression. For that reason I used strong, watery and incomplete brushes to the sky because I thought, and I think, that the white of the paper is also a color.

Blue shadows

When you paint you learn to observe details, and I think if you like photograph what I’m going to write could be useful to you: the shadows are not black, usually they seem to reflect the atmosphere so when you take a photograph in the shadow it seems to have a bluish tone. When cameras have auto white balance they try to compensate but I think that’s good when you are taking a portrait, but to the nature it can end as a photography not natural to what our mind have seen. Be careful.

The shadows can take nice blue tones, for example see this photograph:

meanwhile a shadow

I discovered it observing the shadows of products in the market and I decided to not use black in certain paintings, other times I’d suppress the brown, and things like that. Of course shadows change with the day, but I’d discover that in the future.

That was the reason I used a strong blue shadow in the tree.

Post-data: By the way the teacher put me a “20” upon my painting (grrr!) and before you send rotten tomatoes in Peru the score is from 0 to 20, not 0 to 100 ;-)