Painting The Black Jaguar 🎨🌌 - Digital Painting Process - Blog Post

Hello everyone! I hope you are having a great week so far. In this blog post I am going to share with you how I painted this black jaguar, the steps I took and why I painted it!

Painting The Black Jaguar

Seeing Animals In Dreams

"In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves." - Carl Jung

Dreams seem to be a bit of a taboo topic nowadays. I don't notice anybody else talk about them, apart from me (amongst the people I know). And I don't really know why that is. The famous psychologist Carl Jung covered a lot of research into the area of dreams. Why don't people usually openly talk about their own? I find it fascinating and I don't have a problem sharing and discussing my dreams to others, and I appreciate it when others share theirs with me. It seems they are relevant and important, the subconscious mind using its way to communicate through symbols.

I have had dreams of a number of different animals for years now. One of them was this mysterious black Jaguar in the forest. Similar to the dreams I've had where wolves have been involved, It wasn't just one dream, but a number of them over a period of years.

Symbolic Meaning Of Animals

I have always wanted to explore the meaning of the animals which have made and appearance in my dream, and also to express the animal through my own art work, in drawing and painting.

I decided to look up the symbolic meaning of the black Jaguar, the latest animal which has been 'on my mind', and a number of sources seem to describe the animal as a reminder that there is light at the end of the tunnel of whatever difficult period you are currently in, and that to trust yourself and your ability, your inner strength to be alone and to stand alone without fear. More info on the symbolic meaning of the animal here; https://www.spirit-animals.com/black-jaguar-symbolism/

The article also goes on to describe the black Jaguar as being a powerful and ancient animal totem. The Black Jaguar symbolism represents valour and ferocity, and an enchanting combination of beauty and ability. It has gracefulness and an incredible speed that's very effective when it comes to pursuing something it desires.

Back To Art

The Painting Process

Above Image; Step One of the Jaguar Painting, painting in the shape and contour of the animal digitally using my wacom tablet and stylus.

Over the past few days I decided to go ahead and draw/paint this Black Jaguar. I was initially thinking of painting it in a full forest background, but then an accident happen while I was not consciously thinking about what i was doing with my brush strokes, I began drawing the shape of the animals head as the background! I suddenly saw its potential and decided to run with the idea and turn the painting into a vignette painting/illustration inside the shape of a Jaguars head!

In the image above I began sketching out the Jaguar digitally using my wacom tablet and stylus, and the software photoshop. I wasn't really paying much attention to the background at this stage, which is not the way I always work.

Above Image; Step 2 of the painting.

Now this is where I 'discovered' by accident an idea which I would take all the way through to the final image. I selected a green from the colour palette and without really thinking, I begun making the shape which resembled the Jaguar's head. This wasn't planned at all, and I was not looking at any vignette-related art to trigger this inspiration.

Above image; Step 3 of the painting

I then started to flesh out more of the background for the painting, starting with the grass.

Using The Magic Wand Tool For The Vignette (Adobe Photoshop)

I then selected the green area of the Jaguars head with the magic wand tool in Photoshop which can be found in the tool bar. This tool allows you to select a large area of similar pixels which are connected. So long as the shape is mostly solid and one colour, the tool should be able to select a large portion of it, you can change the range of what it picks up, and I advise a little bit of experimentation here to find what works with the painting. In this case the selection I made didn't pick up all of the edge around the head because it wasn't a completely clean painted outline of the shape by me. So I just went back and cleaned up the edges with a brush afterwords. Selecting the nearest colour with the eye-dropper tool, and painting it back in.

Above Image; Locating The 'Magic Wand' tool in Adobe Photoshop

Above image; Magic wand area is selected, ready to paint inside.

I then decided to paint the background white. I did this quite easily by selecting the paint bucket tool in photoshop's tool bar with white selected, and dropped in onto the background layer.

Above image; painting in a white background layer with the paint bucket tool in photoshop

I then went ahead and painted in the forest (below) with the initial green area of the jaguar's head selected by the magic wand tool. Using mostly cool colours for the background, and warm colours for the foreground, I painted in shapes of the trees. Most of the time I would be zoomed out at this stage, so I cold paint in the larger shapes without worrying about small details.

Above Image; Forest background painting stage. Notice the edges are rough and pixelated because the selection wasn't perfect.

I then zoomed in a little to paint some more details on the Jaguar (below).

Above image; Close-up shot of painting in the Jaguar details

And finally after cleaning up the edges of the illustration, I decided to add an additonal detail on the far right area where the brush strokes were clearly visible. I used this area to paint in some coloured Jaguar rosettes (spots) which clearly show the one spot in the middle of the circular rosette ship, showing clearly that this is in fact a painting of a jaguar, not a leopard. The leopard has a similar pattern, but without the spot in the middle.

Above image; The finished illustration

The Finishing Touches

I then slightly repositioned the illustration into the center of the white canvas, and painted in my signature at the bottom right corner. And that completes the jaguar digital painting!

I am thinking of doing more of these animal digital painting vignettes, starting with the ones which have appeared in my dreams. Let me know if there are any you would like to see me do in the comments below.

Thank you very much for reading, and I hope I offered some useful digital painting tips in this post!

You can check out more of my work on my website; https://www.robbieallenartist.com/