This is one of my favorites. I love the look of loose, quickly-executed and spontaneous watercolor.
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I remember just piling water on this one, I wanted to get all kinds of bloom, or cauliflowering, or whatever you want to call it. It's the effect of moisture leaching into areas that are more dry from areas that are more wet, and it has a neat effect on the pigment. When this sort of thing happens on accident it's a wonderful way to ruin a nice smooth wash, but it has a very interesting texture when done intentionally.
When I finished this one it reminded me of the blocky guache illustration style popular in the 1970s, that you'd see on board games. Or that I seem to remember seeing on leftover board games from the 70's, anyway.
I remember doing a lot of fooling around with the brushpen at the time, lots of quick, jerky movements of the hand, trying not to exercise a lot of fine control, aiming more for energy in the linework than precision.
Halfway through this one I got fed up with it and wound up just moving the paintbrush over the thing in big broad strokes, kind of bent on destroying the picture, but when I was finished I thought the result was very compelling.
At around this time I had had so much fun with quick, loose hand movements on stuff I'd determined to be 'failures' that eventually I started out quick and loose with the brush pen, just letting lines get everywhere without trying to exert much fine control. I had some compliments from the other artists in the sessions these were done in on the style I was starting to develop but I'm not sure it was a style so much as a fun gimmick.
And in any case it's been long enough since I've done any life drawing by this point that I'm sure I'd have no idea how to do this again if I sat down and tried now. D:
Originally a graphic design class assignment, to create a number of easily recognizeable, iconic signs based on given prompts; done in Adobe Illustrator.
Before I started using watercolor a whole bunch, I did a lot of sketching with a pen, because I figured if I wasn't allowed to erase I'd learn to be a little more bold and decisive with my movements, and I concentrated on working fast and loose. A lot of the drawings I did during this period were just straight up copies of photographs of animals from books, because at the time I considered art to be a game of memorization; and that the more images you had in your head and under your fingers then the broader your palette would be when it came time to just make stuff up.
I thought at the time that that's how professionals were so great, they'd just spent all this time soaking up images from study that they could just make up anything on the spot; I didn't learn until later that most concept artists tend to do research and collect lots of reference for each piece they do.
Foxes are cute. There are some people who are just really good at capturing the feel of fur with the lines of their pencils but I'm afraid I'm not yet one of those people.
Drawn from life at a ranch for retired stage cats, this one's name was Sterling. Sterling was the largest cat there.
Big cats are interesting to me because so many of their actions are the same as small cats, they'll rub themselves sidelong against their fenced enclosures when they want to rub themselves against you, and they'll butt their heads and roll onto their backs and so on, and while I know it's just the way cats of any size act, we're sort of used to seeing this kind of activity in small, domesticated cats, so seeing it in a giant 500-pound death machine reads as neotenous beheaviour, and so seems cute and incongruous at the same time.