Brown and Barn Owls

On the way to a half way decent barn owl painting, I thought I’d show you the dud I made for a laugh of course, I know a few of my visitors enjoy that kind of thing. You’d think by now I’d be a watercolour whizz, not the case sadly. I do like the drawing of the brown owl though, shame I lost interest but it happens.

The barn owl I made was just thin layers of watery watercolour built up over days. It’s a real shame that the glue perished on my watercolour block, hence all that nasty paper buckling, which should not have happened! Looks like this guy is going to live under a very heavy box for a few months.

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.

Kangaroo with Watercolour Tubes

My old drawing from 2013

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!