Red Jumping Spider

I’ve turned my hand to hot pressed watercolour paper for a change. I bought this tiny paper which I thought would be excellent to paint little insects on!

The cloud on his abdomen is so beautiful and I achieved that effect using my trusty Brusho pigments and a little bit of water manipulation. I especially love his eyes, which is always the feature I concentrate on the most with every painting I do — maybe the take away is if I spent as much time on every area, I’d have much better paintings.

Forgive the masking tape, but it was all I needed to ensure the paper didn’t buckle too much.

Snowy Surfaced Frog

Just a small frog I painted on special ‘snowy’ textured watercolour paper, I kept it simple and didn’t go too wild with the colour slashes which I’m fighting with myself about … So before I ruin him, here he is!

I thought I’d also see if anyone wants to give him a home, so this frog is now available in my shop.

Kangaroo with Watercolour Tubes

I painted this guy in response to a drawing I was super proud of at the time, I even contacted the photographer who snapped the reference photo, to show them like some toddler and hmm … they never got back to me.

Oh dear, I guess they weren’t impressed, and I never drew another kangaroo, how laughably tragic. Anyway, this painting is okay, nothing special, but with a bit of a twist, I switched from pans to watercolour tubes and I love the rich colours! I didn’t overwork the eyes as I thought they were simple and beautiful.

Tissue Issues

I’m falling into a paralysing anti posting person, as I feel I have to impress people who come to my site … which is sad as this website is my warts and all journal to track my progress. I’ve semi gotten over it so here we are, three fails for us all to learn from. Tissue paper is featured heavily, I love the texture and the weird things it does when adhering it to watercolour paper using Bindex and I wanted to see which areas it worked best in.

I found a face full of tissue can be gross, I often start ripping away at the paper as sometimes the tissue gets cloggy and makes the colours look pebbledashy which doesn’t look nice. Also I’ve been really throwing around the masking fluid, and it doesn’t look good applied in small areas, I think it may look better used extremely finely or in large areas, like my fox!

Tiny Tissue Hare

I hoard tissue paper from the stuff I buy … and I wanted to use it again in my artwork. I went back to my post when I used this technique before as I forgot how to do it!

I glued tissue paper to watercolour paper using Bindex, waited for it to dry overnight and painted on top using watercolour and Brusho. I like the effect, the colour soaks into the tissue paper and dulls in an interesting fashion.

Rabbit Bust

I really love rabbits and hares and I think I want to focus more on painting them. I relate to their flighty, gentle nature which is why I think I’m more drawn to them.

Technically as a drawing I don’t think I’ve nailed it as a composition, and unfortunately my camera has failed to capture the warm colours after over a hundred pictures, eh — technology! But the colours are really lovely in person (you’ll just have to take my word for it).

I painted this 14 × 10" rabbit bust in mainly just watercolour with a sprinkling of Brusho here and there with of course the Indian ink and white pen additions.

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