Illustration Friday - Breakfast (Work in Progress)

I've been a little under the weather this week and haven't felt like sitting at my computer for very long, so I'm posting this week's Illustration Friday challenge ('Breakfast') as a work in progress. If you're interested in seeing the final piece, bookmark my blog and check back in a few days, hopefully it will be completed by your next visit.

The version you see here is shown displayed with both the color palette that I'm using, and the layer with my sketch on it, turned on.

For many families, breakfast time is a rather rushed time of day. Thinking about that, led me to think about creating a somewhat chaotic scene, but since I had also recently been studying some of the Little Golden Book art of J.P. Miller, Feodor Rojankovsy and Mary Blair, I also got excited about doing the scene in the style of a vintage Little Golden Book. I toyed with the idea of mixing children and various animals, but then, after looking at some pictures of Orangutans on the internet, I decided to create a scene of an Orangutan family breakfast. Orangutans have great facial expressions and their babies are some of the cutest babies in the entire animal kingdom, so they were a perfect choice.

Before starting, I made two sketches in my sketchbook, one in ink and one in pencil.  There were things I liked about each sketch, so I ended up combing elements from both of them.

From these two rough sketches I created a more refined, finished sketch. You can see that as I started painting, I began making some changes.  For one, I decided against doing the floor in perspective. Perspective has never been one of my strong points and I didn't want to get hung up on trying to make it look right, so I decided to "flatten" out the floor. I felt this also gave me the leeway to take some license with the shape of the fallen over chair and the lines making up the window in the background. One of the most recent changes I made was to have the Orangutan who is half hiding under the table, reach up, trying to sneak another piece of toast.

In this last graphic, you can see what the image looks like with the sketch layer and color palette layers turned off.  This is pretty much where the image stands at the moment. With the exception of the stove and the rest of the cabinets, the colors are pretty much all blocked in, now I just have to start adding some detailing and shading. Hopefully, I'll have it finished in the next day or so.