Alpaca Mountains

During our trip to France and Italy last month, we drove around and up and down quite a few mountains. And what beautiful sceneries there were! One trip that stood out most though was Pic du Midi by the Pyrenees when we came across a herd of alpacas on the field at the bottom. They were just so cute, simply roaming around aimlessly enjoying themselves with no care in the world. And of course I wanted to paint about this when I got home!

The Start

I went for digital art on Procreate this time. Before sketching, though, I had a little practice in drawing alpacas. It was definitely a challenge to say the least! Whilst googling “alpaca anime”, I gathered quite a few ideas and developed my own version. Then I finally nailed it! And that one alpaca became seven through duplicating it over and over again, and in some cases flipping vertically. How amazing is that! And now the mountains in the background…

Filling in With Colors

Time to get coloring now! I went for my usual Medium Airbrush for that, choosing a range of earthy tones as well as some bright shades to enhance the cuteness. For each alpaca, a separate layer was assigned, and the same applied to the mountains. Separate layers come handy if you need to move or modify any part of the painting with ease. Now so far, so cute!

Introducing Texture

And here comes the best part, adding texture! What makes it so fun is being able to play around with the available brushes and seeing what we can come up with. For the alpacas, the obvious choice was the curly fur from Eldar Zakirov’s Fur Brush set. The sky was scattered with the Clouds brush, the fields with Tempeh and the darker mountains with the Powder texture brushes from the Magical Textures set. Both the sets are available on Creative Marker. And look what we have here!

Now that was a fun session! I must say I did enjoy exploring beyond my comfort zone when drawing the alpacas. Always a pleasure to learn something new! Experimenting with various textures brushes was also another challenge I liked. Perhaps I might like to try an identical painting like this on paper and see what cool textures can be possible…