Sometimes paintings just don’t work out - I lose interest and don’t want to redo even with my fantastic Light Pad. I’m going to make of habit of taking posting inks before they get painted. My kissy wood pigeons unfortunately didn’t work out, but my fox is in progress.
The Seagull and the Swallow
The struggle for good white ink continues, a toothpastey nightmare. On the Seagull I used Pebeo Colorex a French ink and for the swallow just Winsor & Newton white gouache, since my Dr. Ph. Martin’s ink dried up through neglect - and I found it difficult to swallow the price since it doesn’t seem to be very shelf stable.
The search for good white ink seems endless! These two birds in addition to sad white pigment were made from Brusho, watercolour and ink with a smidge of charcoal on the gull on 100lb Montval Canson watercolour paper.
March Magpies
March was the month of the magpies according to my garden activity, so I painted a few taking obvious liberties with colour and people eyes, the Brusho came out again! My favourite one is the bluey magpie as I messed with him the least and it’s just a really pretty image in person.
Scrappy Insects
On odd scraps of watercolour paper I decided to paint a few simple insects, mostly in Brusho. As Brusho is pigmented colour dust it doesn’t take very much to make your eyes hurt, in a good way. I’ve used Montval Canson 100lb paper here, it’s pretty thin so buckling and creases sadly is a thing, but I found you can just massage most of them out with your fingers if you have a spare half an hour — it’s a brilliant practice paper otherwise.
Charcoal & Pastel Badger
2013’s Blue Badger attempt using watercolour and Indian Ink only.
I’ve always struggled with badgers, as I felt there wasn’t anything interesting I could do colour-wise with them, but I braved the badger again, this time armed pastels and charcoal alongside my watercolour and Brusho underpainting.
The last and only time I created a badger piece was in 2013, when I had a bit of a problem with circles …
Luckily 2013’s badger found a home so it wasn’t all bad, and I still think he’s interesting to compare against, I guess now I have an orange problem - but it is a nice colour!
Pastel Pigeons
I haven’t played with pastels much, I usually only use them to dust over insect paintings and never really took them seriously.
But I recently brought them out after feeling in a bit of a rut and discovered I really enjoy them! I particularly like the sculptural aspect of them, scoring the paper erratically but also knowing you can remove the colour instantly with a dry paintbrush or rubber. I really love pigeons, they are my favourite animal, so I thought they could spur me onto make something interesting.
Tiny Watercolours
These are tiny little watercolours I’ve done on bits of otherwise unusable watercolour paper. So glad I kept the odds and sods about to paint on, the big head problem is especially noticeable when working on such a small scale which gives me a laugh.
Charcoal Squirrel
Another squirrel with a slight charcoal twist, I liked the fuzziness, especially on the snowy textured watercolour paper which I only use when I’m feeling a bit fancy. I especially love the eyes again, I do spend a lot of time on eyes. The eyes of a painting alone can easily take me 3 hours, probably isn’t all that necessary but I feel like it needs to look right as it is the heart of every painting I do. This squirrel is now available my shop.
Watercolour Beavers
I’ve been working on a project which requires, a large amount of beavers! These are all watercolour and brusho with my usual mix of mediums. My favourite is clearly the first one, but I painted several not knowing which one will be chosen.
The Indian ink style was the one which got selected, and I will post later to not ruin the surprise of how it will look in full watercolour and animated for an exciting Rewilding Project by Ecologist Rob Lewis.
Tiny Tanuki Statue & Wildlife Inks
I wanted to make tiny simple paintings I can do of an evening as I have a few creative things I am juggling at the moment, this one is around 13 × 8cm, in just watercolour and ink.
This is a painting inspired by traditional tanuki statues from Japan, along with some animal friends who are also very small, I will also paint these and post.
Sparrowish Paintings
My wrist is feeling better, so I tinkered about in my tiny watercolour pad and made a couple of sparrow inspired paintings, since the birds are always messing about in the garden squabbling and being clowns. I finally found a use for that useless, bin-able watercolour ground which was marketed as the end to all watercolour mistakes. Its gritty texture I used to add fluff to the face of these bird paintings, bit of an experiment, I still think it’s a rubbish product.
(No More) Suffering for My Art
Look at this. This is how I’ve severely damaged my wrist, to the point where I cannot even use a pencil or type this out without pain and discomfort.
This is stupid. I use this method to transfer my images onto watercolour paper, without having to directly draw on the watercolour paper – because mistakes do happen!
I flip the original drawing over, tape it to the sides of the watercolour paper, draw around the picture so I know the boundaries of where I need to aggressively press with a fine point. And yeah, just go nuts furiously on the back to transfer a flipped, fainter image of your original drawing.
This method ruins your original drawing, it's only good for a couple of goes before the paper starts to rip and disintegrate.
You, probably like I, have seen this technique all over art blogs and it’s fairly popular, even though is takes a huge amount of time. You can’t see what you’re doing, you’re wasting the lead in your drawing pencils AND the image is flipped so you just have to pray that you can make it look ‘right’, which isn’t easy, which you then have to spend more time rectifying - if you can … AND you can really hurt yourself as you have to apply a ton of pressure to squeeze every bit of detail off of the drawing paper onto the watercolour paper.
What’s the alternative? Well there’s transfer paper, but that’s not so good which is why I don’t use it.
You’re still having to use quite a bit of pressure, and it is clunky. There’s no way can you get lines of different thicknesses, which leaves you having to draw many of the finer details in later. Not to mention you are working directly over your original drawing, retracing the lines which spoils the original.
Also it can be mucky if you’ve accidentally leant on your work in the wrong way, big black patches of impossible to remove carbon/transfer muck can appear on your watercolour paper along with your now chunky drawing. Also you are applying as much pressure as you can - because transferring sometimes doesn’t work. You’ll only know if you tentatively peel back the layers, an area at a time or remove them altogether after you’ve finished with your fingers and toes crossed.
How should I transfer an image if I don’t want to directly work on the watercolour paper?
USE A LIGHT PAD! I’ve just bought my Huion Light Pad (not sponsored!), and it was inexpensive, easy and one of the better brands. You lay your original drawing face up on the light pad, overlay your watercolour paper on top of the original drawing also face up, turn the switch and alter the level of illumination and you should see your drawing appearing through the watercolour paper.
The only caveat is that if you want to get a stronger image appearing on the watercolour paper you’ll have to be in a darker room or at night if you still haven’t sorted out any window dressings ... You can use it in the day but the details won’t come through as easily.
This method isn’t perfect and I’m not going to pretend your drawing is super high definition - the glare of the box in the dark can be a bit much if you’re using it on a high illumination setting. But you’re not messing up your wrist or ruining your original drawings which means you can trace over and over again - tweaking your drawing, making them better, make easy compositions with other drawings, it is brilliant.
Don’t be cheap or stupid - like I was, there are better alternatives to image transfer and using a light pad has really injected a huge amount of joy into an arduous task. You still might have to go back and redraw some of the finer details but at least you don’t have a crippled up wrist.
Please send your prayers and thoughts to my wrist, I’ll update soon once I’m fully healed!
Beaver Sketch
Just a little sketch of a beaver for an upcoming collaborative project. Featuring my usual fineliner and ink combination, my final version I aim to be a little more characterful. Just thought this needed posting before it goes in the pile … I’m keeping the composition, but will make it less generic looking in the final drawing.
Cold vs Hot Press Mice
A couple of quick paintings experimenting between the two popular types of watercolour paper. The hot pressed version of my mouse is the one where I went white pen crazy - looks really ugly. The cold pressed mouse I had a little more interest in, I used Indian ink more which always does interesting things when watered down.
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.
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
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!
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.
