~July 24, 2022~
"If you are willing to do something that might not work, you're closer to being an artist." -Seth Godin
Specifics about the painting:
Painted in June 2022 | Canson Moulin du Roy 140lb cold press paper | Turner professional watercolour paint | Uni Pin archival ink pens | 8.4"x10.5"
Availability: available for purchase.
This painting is the final product of three different attempts of painting this bear - each one a bit better than the last. It was a day early in June when this bear (called Boo) was in the yard eating dandelion flowers. I was watching him out the window as I often do, when I noticed there was a fox in the yard as well. I thought that was a neat encounter and it reminded me of something out of a storybook. Then inspiration hit me! I got the desire to paint [somewhat] matching portraits of the bear and fox. I could picture the paintings so clearly, the animals would be framed by limey-green bracken ferns and twigs to suggest they are just in the edge of the woods. The paintings were going to be magical! I hurried to sketch my ideas.
I had a decent reference photo of the bear, but not for the fox unfortunately. I really loved the bear sketch, so I decided to leave the fox for a later time and just paint the bear first. After I drew the bear onto my watercolour paper, I got everything set up and started painting. It was going well at first, but soon I realized I didn't fully plan the process or how exactly I wanted to paint this. I just went for it, but it wasn't working out. Instead of continuing to work on the painting, I decided that I was just going try again. I took what I had learnt from the first attempt, and tried to apply that to the second one. I liked the second one much more - especially the background - but this time the bear's anatomy was off and I still didn't know or plan out how I was going to paint his black fur. I haven't painted many black animals before, so I still find it a bit daunting and because there's so many possible ways to paint fur in general, I was lost on what to do with the fur. I wasn't liking how the dark fur looked with the light yellow-green background, even though it looked good in my head. I was enjoying the process though, and I thought it had potential, but things where getting muddy and I just wasn't feeling it anymore. Well, on to the third try!
I really didn't want to give up on my vision, so I kept getting back into the painting saddle. This time I really liked the sketch and the anatomy of the bear, so I was pretty hopeful that it would turn out good. I decided to make the first layer more washy and let the colours from the bear flow into the background, then I'd paint the ferns on top of that. All was going well, then I went to add some green to the bear but it wasn't the green I meant to add. This green was mush cooler and muted, but I didn't mind it, so I continued painting. My paint wasn't really flowing as much as I wanted it to, so I added some more water... then I noticed I was getting blooms and back-runs on the painting. I actually thought it looked pretty, so I just worked with it and tried to exaggerate the effect a bit. Once it dried, I had mixed feelings about it. I liked how it was looking, but it still didn't look like my original inspiration, so that made me a little disheartened. I had been wanting to bring back more looseness and abstraction into my paintings as I feel that my recent work has gotten a bit stiff and has lost some of that watercolour "spirit" that I love, so abandoning the original idea, I decided to keep this painting as undone and fresh as I could. I just finished the eye and added some more shading and that was going to be it; however, I felt like something was missing and I wanted to bring up the contrast a notch but I didn't really want to add more layers of paint. I'm not sure where it came from, but I got the idea to add some pen work for shading and to defined the edges, and to add some personality. I didn't feel very precious about the painting, so I thought why not give it a try. My drawing/sketching style obviously looks quite different from my paintings, but I figured adding pen and cross-hatching to this painting could be a interesting way to amalgamate the two. So I tried it! It was a lot of fun, and I love how it turned out! I haven't really done much mixed-media work, so this was a good step into that realm and I'll definitely being making more artwork like this in the future!
Although the end result doesn't look like the original idea, I love what became of this painting and I believe it to be a success after all!
Thank you so much for reading! Take care, and don't forget to find the beauty in life's moments!
-Cheyenne
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