As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been painting a lot over the past few weeks using watercolor and gouache. Today’s post came from a warm-up exercise with these in my big watercolor sketchbook. On the first day, I just filled the page with a rainbow of cat-face-shapes. I used one pretty large round brush and used a bunch of different wash techniques.
The next day, my warm- up was to paint face on each one using black gouache (an opaque matte watercolor). I used one size brush again, to get the scale of the line pretty consistent. I tried to give each one a different face with no repeats, while trying to make sure that they still looked like they belonged together. It was a really fun way to start a dark, chilly morning.
It’s difficult for me to not overwork something like this. I usually either add too much little detail, or I clumsily drag my sleeve through one of the shapes and smear it before it dries! But this went really well, and I’m definitely going to do more warm-ups like this one. It was a great chance to practice different wash techniques, including fun blotchy, bloomy ones. In the meantime, I like these little guys enough that I’m going to put them on the cards I’m making, and possibly other things…