Finicky Darn Watercolours

Gosh, watercolours are so tough! All those many things to control. And things can go wrong so easily. You need skill, and also, I’m finding out, strong confidence to carry it off. Good abilities to practice.

I’m obviously not the super-smooth kind of artist like Jim Woodring or Vargas, but it’s fun to work on new skills. The two pictures below let me try my chops at drawing machines, and the last one, spreading areas of dark as smoothly as possible.

Kind of depressing that a photoshop filter would do the same job so quickly. (I didn’t doctor that one, though, because it’s about the process!)

If I were doing this again, I’d do preparatory drawings so the subject wouldn’t be so goony, and draw circles and straight lines with a template or ruler. Obviously, I could never measure up to those gentlemen I mentioned above, but we’re all following our own paths.

These two are vaguely (or not so vaguely) militaristic. There’s a side of me that’s a little conservative, and likes airplanes and motors, etc. But I’m pretty much a lily-livered liberal and “Nice Guy” in practice. That might be a little contradictory, but hey, like Walt Whitman, we can “contain multitudes.”

Tags: Animals, cats, men, planes