I love Halloween and I especially love ghost stories so I had to do a ghost design for the holiday. I ended up doing a monochrome purple painting. I’m happy the design looks great on a bunch of stuff! I’ve got more Halloween designs ready to paint and clean up too.
An old friend asked me to design a tattoo for her with a diving loon and water lilies with an art nouveau flair. She sent me some inspiration pictures and the loon’s wavy wings were taken from one of those pictures. Unfortunately I don’t know who the original artist was so I can’t credit them. I was able to be more original with the rest of the painting though. I think I went through four different designs for the swirls in the loon before I settled on the one you see here.
One of the challenges here was that I don’t know anything about tattoos other than the lines can’t be too thin. Coloring tattoos is a mystery to me as well so I decided to just do what I normally do. I painted the whole thing with watercolor and gouache and sent it to my friend with a note saying to consider it color suggestions for her tattoo artist.
I expected to go through a few drafts with her, but we lucked out and she loved everything I showed her. I finished the sketches and the painting itself without much fuss which was great. I love how this painting came out too. It was a really fun project to work on. And now one of my best friends has my art on her body. I can’t think of a better compliment!
A new watercolor painting today. A bear with a sweet tooth. Lucky for him, the bees don’t seem upset.
I love drawing cute things! I watch a ton of nature documentaries too so I feel like it’s only natural that I keep painting cute animal pictures. This is a baby harp seal which you’ve probably seen pictures of before.
Picture credit: Cassandra D./National Geographic
So cute! I couldn’t resist painting that happy face. It’s very much winter in Minnesota too so painting a winter scene seemed appropriate. I’ll probably do a few more winter scenes before the snow melts.
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It was a pretty nice day to visit the zoo so I spent some time watching the giraffes on a bench. They were very active. They barely stood still actually, so this painting needed to be done quickly. I only saw this particular pose once for about a couple seconds. I sketched a quick form and then studied the giraffes as they walked around. That helped me make a more accurate drawing before I started painting.
It got cloudy towards the end, but overall it was a nice day to paint on Raspberry Island. I’ve been trying to do more plein air painting this summer so there will be more posts soon with the other paintings I’ve done.
I used watercolors primarily. I added some finishing touches later with gouache and watercolor pencil.
