Over the last few days, I’ve found myself listening to the Lion King Soundtrack over and over so naturally one thing that has sprung to my mind while drawing was wild animals. Not just any wild animals though, the ones that people consider the most dangerous but majestic; wild cats and dogs.
Earlier on in the week, a friend bought me a new set of Derwent watercolour paints so lately I’ve been trying out various techniques with them creating a little collection of paintings.
The painting with the tiger lying down was made using a black biro scratching into very thick paper, then simple strokes of colour to show the depth of the tiger itself. I used a lot of paint layers whilst doing this in order to create the contrast between light and shade. As a result of allowing various parts to dry first, this painting took me approximately four hours.
The leopard eye was done using pressing; I got colour on one side of the brush and pushed it down, making the spots look pretty realistic. I also found that the longer I pressed down, the thicker the spots actually turned out to be. The eye itself was done by mixing green, yellow and a little bit of blue and black to make the actual pupil with white drops put in the corners. Those white drops spread across the base eye paint, making it look more wet and natural. This painting took me around an hour to complete.
The lying down fennec fox was done free hand with “hot” colours to show the fact that the fox lives only in deserts. Plus, I’d ran out of brown at this point….I found out here that the more watery the colours were, the darker they’d set on the outlines. Therefore, areas like the tail, back and ears were done using at lot more water than the rest of the fox. This painting took me about 15 minutes.
The last painting, the one with the tigers face and paint splashes, took the majority of a day to complete. I had to practice on several scrap pieces of paper how to splash watercolours so that they look effective. The pencil part of the painting took the most time though, I used 4H and B pencils to block sketch the stripes and eyes and then used 3B and 6B pencils to shade it. The shading practically made my whole hand silver, considering I’m a leftie, which was pretty cool, though it did take forever to wash off….
I’ll continue to make small collections weekly, hopefully, so be prepared peeps 🙂
Wakefield Art 
Wonderful art! Thank you very much for sharing!
Thank you also for the reblog and the feedback! 🙂
Just amazing. I never got the hang of water colours. I do admire how they look and the gorgeous pictures that can be made with them. Way to go. 🙂
Thank you! It has taken me almost a year to figure them out properly, I just think they always look pretty, plus theyre good fun to work with aswell 🙂