More Watercolour Wolves

Here are some more wolves I’ve been working on for my friend’s book, trying to nail a style for what she’d like for her characters and front covers.

They are much simpler and more fun than the giant wolf heads I was painting before. I mainly used Brusho pigment to paint these and you can tell by how strong the colours are.

Honey Bee

etsy-bee3.jpg

Winter is quickly approaching, and we’re not going to see our lovely bees pottering around much now. They are probably chewing their way between the brickwork of our houses to snuggle up waiting out the cold.

I thought I’d do a sweet, simple little painting of one, it can be found in my shop and was painted with Brusho, watercolour, and a bit of crêpe paper.

Wolf Work in Progresses

Here are a couple of wolves I’m working on for my friends book. The colours are significant to the story, so I get to exaggerate them a little, which I’m very happy about.

I used masking fluid to keep some of the fur streaks protected from my enthusiastic ink and Brusho usage, and white pigment to draw in some fluff and highlights.

Blue Spotted Salamander

The lovely man who asked me to paint him an eastern newt, loved the painting so much he commissioned me another slithery — this time a blue spotted salamander to hang alongside his newt. These two salamanders were painted with blue watercolours and grey Brusho, white pigment and Indian ink.

I’m really happy how these two came out, but a little sad that I messed up an initial painting I made. I loved his cheeky face but ruined the background through trying to correct mistakes and just snowballing the issue …

There is no hiding with watercolour, which is why I love it and hate it sometimes.

Sitting Wolves

This is another wolfy experiment, on scrappy watercolour paper in preparation for my friends novel I will be illustrating. I really love this scribbly painting, I’m going to lean into this style much more heavily in my personal artwork as it’s so much more fun, loose and expressive!

Little Wolf Head

wolf-head-1.jpg

An author friend has asked me to illustrate her new novel about wolves, so here is a draft practicing a wolf with a bit of an expression. She’s an A5 watercolour painted mostly in yellow watercolour, grey Brusho and Indian ink.

Eastern Newt

I was commissioned by an art lover from Ohio to this eastern newt in its ‘red eft’ stage. I was really pleased with this commission as any excuse to splash orange around makes me very happy!
The orange colour is only restricted to the juvenile stage of the newt’s life and when it ages up in a couple of years becomes a greenish, brown or olive colour but keeps its red spots.

I painted these newts on one of my favourite ‘snowy surfaced’ watercolour paper, with its cotton like, fluffy texture. I added crêpe paper for even more texture which creases and traps Brusho pigment in interesting ways.

Since I always make alternate versions when commissioned, the vertical oriented newt is available in my shop.

Bold Jumping Spider

jumping-spider-black-depth.jpg

This is a little, fuzzy jumping spider I decided to paint this after watching a documentary on how cute and expressive these guys are. This painting is about 180mm across, small, but not as minuscule as a real jumping spider (8-11mm) and painted on hot pressed watercolour paper, Indian ink and Brusho.

This bold jumping spider is hanging out in my shop, I hope to make a series of spiders, each with a crazy vibrant colour scheme. If I find any orange ones, I’ll be in my element!

Drafting up a Newt Painting

draft-newt-depth.jpg

This was one of my first draft paintings for a commission, it’s a little rough round the edges but it helped me decide what I was going to do with the background around this little newt here. In the final version I decided to simplify the background and not build it up so much into huge saturated clouds of colour.

I also had some buckling issues and finally learned how to solve all buckling by using glass sheets as a press instead of the wooden blocks I was using before. The glass kept the painting wet for a lot longer allowing for the moisture to permeate much more slowly throughout the paper making for much flatter results.


Polar Bear

Another little A5 bear, this one painted on cold pressed watercolour paper. The grey and darker tones were made with a fineliner, all other colours were just regular old watercolour pans with some Indian ink splodges of course.