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Anne Belov has been painting Fine Art for over 35 years, and doing printmaking for the last 17 years. She studied art at Philadelphia College of Art and later got her MFA in painting from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Over the years, she has realized nothing goes to waste.  All her artistic endeavors have taught her that she can carry over things learned from one project to the next.  From etching, she learned to love process, strengthen her value range and composition in my paintings, and enhance my ability to meet a deadline and now the impulses toward narrative in her paintings has fueled her desire to make visual stories for children.

Today she is venturing down the road of children’s books illustration and letting her life long passion for Panda Bears show up in her wordless picture book, Pandamorphosis.

She has been a pandamaniac since childhood. Four years ago, a chance encounter with an Atlantic Monthly story on pandas reignited her obsession. Since then, her online cartoon The Panda Chronicles has been gaining fans in leaps and bounds.

A serious painter, as well as a panda punster, Ms Belov resides in the Pacific Northwest where she presides over the Institute for Contemporary Panda Satire. Here is Anne showing and explaining her process:

This is actually 3 steps down the road to this new painting. I’ve done the drawing, under-painted a value study in egg tempera, and then glazed it with a mixture of a warm yellow-green and transparent yellow ochre, mixed with lots of neomeglip. As soon as I decide “I’m always doing it like such and such”, I start doing things differently. I’m working on a smooth clayboard, which is a commercially made product by Ampersand. Sometimes I like to use a very smooth surface, especially when I want to include lots of fussy and subtle detail.

This is halfway between stage 1 and 2, where I am reinforcing the value underpainting with a layer of mostly transparent purple underpainting. This will help reinforce the value structure, particularly in the darker passages. One of the big challenges is to keep the darks more transparent, which keeps them from going “dead”. Here is the full stage 2

Stage 3:  OK now we’re on to adding color over most of the painting. OK well all of the painting. Still very rough at this point. I always want to keep edges soft until I’m at a more final stage in the painting. I’m working on the foreground first, as I want it to really pop out from the picture plane, so I want the background to work with the foreground, rather than vice versa. Capisce?

This is Stage 4

Stage 5: What happens here is that I try to experime