Watercolor Wednesday 4

Hello there, readers! Last week I felt a sudden surge of inspiration that made me feel unusually and wonderfully ambitious. Naturally, the universe then saw fit to strike me down for my hubris by giving me a nasty head cold that was going around work.




Anyway: I started off with a slew of doodles. The guys in the bottom left corner bear a passing resemblance to my dog! Not much came from this page, just a lot of tossing ideas around on paper.




Onto the second page of doodles: mostly creepy cartoon animals (surprise!) and, if you squint, a teeny tiny gestural doodle of a dancing rollerblading guy that lives in my neighborhood—whom I affectionately refer to as "Rollerblade Dancer." I finally settled on "stuffed animals playing cards" for the actual drawing I was going to finish up and paint, and that's what the larger drawing on this page is from.




For this week's painting I decided to avoid the hassle of erasing a ton of construction lines! The paper I use doesn't take to erasers very well, so I always end up with at least a few faint smudges here and there. I sketched out the images until I was happy with them, and then traced them onto watercolor paper using a light table. I have absolutely no idea why I didn't try this sooner, as it worked like a charm! No fussing around with erasers at all.


Technique-wise, I didn't do a lot of new things with this piece besides dabbing the paint on to create a mottled fabric look on the lion. I'm probably going to paint more of these guys in the future and try arranging them in front of some sort of background.