Exercise Bee

Just a scant few minutes for painting today, so I thought I’d try out something I’d seen on Kate Osborne’s lovely blog. This is shameless imitation, for the sake of knowledge…but I like what I’ve learned! Kate’s video really was inspiring, I’d encourage anyone interested in watercolours to take a look at her site.

No underdrawing necessary here – it was straight on with the paint. New to me today was using a fan brush to pull the puddled paint outwards, which gives a really pleasing furry effect when you get it right. Today it worked best on the right hand bee, although I was too heavy-handed using it on the left hand bee, and forgot to use it at all on the centre chap.

I was also trying out some new QoR paints (a delicious present) and since I have fewer colours than in my normal palette (W&N) I was encouraged to do my colour mixing with pretty much just 4 colours – Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna and Indian Yellow plus a tiny amount of Pyrrole Red. Sloppy splashing on the paper made a bit of spattering a necessity, but what joy!