Started watercolor class today, and got excited to do something so earlier in the week I drew a cat to paint.
I’m using Baohong Academy cold-press paper for this whole project. Kind of a pain to draw on with the texture, but I do love how the paper handles the water. I’m also using Mijello Mission Gold pure pigment watercolors. You know, the ones that are single-pigment tubes? They’re super vibrant and very potent. I loved working with them.
In class, I started doing the colors and decided to let it dry after this stage before I continued.
I really wasn’t sure how it’d turn out at this point; I thought it looked weird and really not great! I wasn’t sure I’d find a way to finish it that wasn’t overworking the whole thing. But I told myself to step back, let this dry, and finish it up. The professor said we’d have to get the ugly paintings out before we got anything that looked really good, so I resolved to just do my best and get one of those ‘ugly paintings’ out of my system before the end of the class.
Glad I stuck with it because wow, I love how the finished product turned out!
Yeah, I could nitpick about some things. I’m certainly not happy with the ghosting from the erased pencil marks I couldn’t get to come off, for example. The ears could do better. I could’ve been cleaner around the eyes. I wish I’d waited for the chest area to dry before trying to put purple on for a collar, even though that turned out to be a happy shading accident in the end.
But overall, it turned out really good. I’ve mentioned this is my first time doing a watercolor painting of an animal? No? Well, it is. I probably should’ve chosen something other than a tabby for my first shot, but it worked out really well in the end I think. The stripes on the cat’s markings help give the whole thing some contour and make sense of the splotches of color that looked like they were going to be too mismatched at first.
