A new portrait appearing on the paper. No preliminary sketch, as I haven`t used a model nor a reference photo. That`s what I like the best - to see who will appear and what mood they are in!

Back to portraits

I was practicing on painting negative shapes - painting the bakground rather than the form itself - when this figure showed up.

Watercolour iris

Today I have been struggling with some wet-in-wet exercises - nothing worked out right. The exercises is, however, from a highly recommendable book, with lovely photos and good tips: "The essence of watercolour" by Hazel Soan.

At the end of the day gave up the wet-in-wet exercises and decided to just paint a flower, after inspiration from a nother very nice book, namely "Painting flowers with impact in watercolour" by Julie Collins.

So, then I finally managed to paint this iris.

Squirrel III

Here is a third version of a squirrel. I wanted to achieve a more loose style on this one.

Squirrel II

Here is another version of the squirrel. I started out with some pencil marks as I planned to make a more neat painting. But it didn`t last many minutes. I find it so much more fun to let the paint and water run and dry its own way!

This one is also painted in my sketch book, with only 160 g paper. What was fun to watch was how the paint was flowing and drying on this smooth surface. Normally I don`t paint on smooth paper.

Here is a close up photo of some lovely colour fusions on this smooth paper quality. I think I will try to paint another squirrel on high quality smooth paper to see what happens!

Squirrel sketch

I have been working on some paintings of squirrels the last days. I have been using a small photo from the newspaper as a reference. This was the first one, a sketch where I drew a very loose pen drawing and then quickly put on some paint. It is from my sketch book, so it is not watercolour paper. I will show other versions of watercolour squirrels later.