Progress: Dormice

Sketch and colour study for an upcoming painting.

This is in the way of a companion piece to Caravanning – It's the same dimensions (albeit in portrait rather than landscape) and a similar subject, only this time it's dormice, not shrews.

As you can see, my sketches and colour studies are usually pretty scrappy (not like the nice tidy one I did for Fred just recently =P) ; I just want enough to tell me vaguely what I'm doing.

This image wasn't always going to look like this. Yesterday it was a square format image, and I'd got as far as the colour study before I decided that I didn't like the composition much at all:

Something about it just bothered me, so I started again from scratch (barring the sleeping baby mice) today. I especially wasn't happy with mother-dormouse, and the hawthorn was a bit distracting, and a bit spiky. I think switching to an elongated format and blackberries was a move for the better. =)

Sketch is mechanical pencil on layout paper. 

Colour studies were done in Photoshop CS4.