This is the very first of all the Cold Time pictures both in the sucession of scenes in the story and time it was painted. The picture dates from July 4th 2002 and is titled (not very originally) "Ducky broken into the ice". Some of the characters are having too long and thin legs, which is a regretably frequent error in my pictures. Cera's face looks a little fat, and her eyes are too small, but I like her expression which gives away that at the moment she is (unlike Littlefoot) more anoyed about slipping on the ice than worried about Ducky. The mountains in the background are not outlined clearly and it is hard to decide whether that is a good thing (showing that they are some distance away on a hazy morning) or a bad thing (just too blury. This is more of a problem in the scanned than in the original though). I reckon a clear outlining of the mountains might have looked better than the clear outlining of the frozen river banks (which would be hard to make out in reality I suppose). What annoys me most is that blur that is supposed to be a leafless forest in the background. It was the first time I tried the technique of using a dry aquarelle pencil on wet ground. The failure of the result frightened me from using it again very often I think.
Here is a sketch I made before I made the final painting. Using a hard pencil the outlines of the sketch are not very clear, but you can still see that I changed the position of Littlefoot and Cera in the final picture while Ducky, Petrie, and Spike look pretty much the way they do in the first planning sketch:
This message has been edited by Malte279 on Apr 22, 2006 10:53 AM
