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Day 8: Wash practice & potted cat

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watercolour cat sitting in a stone planter cat
Potted cat

I had a lovely afternoon mucking around today, I experimented with some wet into wet washes – I’m not too keen on the colours but they mostly seemed to work OK. Then I went back to the potted cat sketch that I started a few days ago and put some more detail into it.

Overall I’m happy with the progress I’ve made on the cat, the shape and shading is pretty close and the planter almost looks ‘stoney’ – I think this could have been emphasised more though. My biggest problem was starting this too small which made painting the features on the cat really hard. I think I may try this again at a sensible size as I’d also like to practice making the technique looser.

practice washes
practice washes

With the washes I followed the example of Birgit O’Connor after watching her tutorial on Artists Network, wetting the paper first and then running pre mixed colour washes into it. Her colours are much juicer than mine, but generally the results were similar. While I had some wet washes sitting there I also experimented with pulling the colour back out, by using a clean wet brush and also by scraping with my fingernail – these are the odd marks you can see in the washes.