A while back I joined a watercolor class on Reddit. I finished first exercise with the painting of the rum bottle, which by the way, now live happily with friends.
Today as the power was out for hours anyway, I decided I’d give watercolor exercise II a try. Combining the work in monochromatic with a technique I had watched on Youtube, by a very skilled watercolor artist, Iraville.
Plus, since today’s theme on Sketchdaily on Reddit was “tuxedo cat” I decided the subject had to be a still life with a cat then.
The family cat who seemed to have a bright future as model, cooperated for a grand total of about 5 seconds. Then he went hunting my brushes and then he was off, distracted by the kids left over chicken dinner. So in the end, this exercise is mostly painting from memory and imagination.
I had lots of fun playing with the fluffy technique and keeping the exercise limits of using only one color. As it turned out I hated the color I had chosen though. In the scan it turned out mostly bright yellow, even though it started out as brown on the paper. Its official name is “Raw Umber”. To fix it I desaturated the scanned picture till it was just black, grey and white with a slight warm tint left. I like it a lot more this way and it is still monochromatic as the exercise dictated.
So I learned a bunch from this exercise. The new painting technique turned out extremely hard to control and of course working in monochromatic you need to have good control of the small differences in hue. All in all I think it worked out. I like the little fluffy grey cat a lot.
