Welcoming the Year of the Rooster

Happy Lunar New Year!

The last two months saw three major holidays packed close to each other. Lunar new year is the last one. I want to draw something nice as a greeting, so I spent longer than usual on this piece.

Designing was surprisingly easy. I knew the rooster would feature prominently because the new year is the year of the rooster. Seeing stylized, abstracted imagery of rooster gave me the idea of a fiery, perhaps imaginary rooster in the background with Maggie and Faito floating in the foreground.

Coloring was more difficult. I still need to practice more with color pencils to control values. I deliberately chose non-traditional Chinese New Year colors (that is, not red). Fortunately, it is easy to find such color schemes in Singapore. (See these examples for an idea.) So I thought of including pink, yellow, and green.
During execution, I was caught in my fascination with the pleasant sequence of red, orange, yellow, lime green, and green. This sequence fills most of the rooster. However, roosters usually have dark tail feathers. My solution was ending the sequence with cyan, sky blue, and blue. I admit the result is perhaps too much, but I think I kept them in some degree of harmony.

(Ah, on hindsight, perhaps Faito's clothes should have been closer to blue.)

Let me know if you enjoy finding out how I worked. Please don't hesitate to tell me what you want to know more so I can include it in future posts.