Step-by-Step Watercolour Painting - Part 5

This is the last Part in the Step-by-Step Watercolour Painting Series.  You can see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 by clicking on these links.

I started with a photo that I had taken a while ago.  I have been working on these plastic animals in bowls for sometime, and have quite a few reference photos.  This painting is 18cm x 18cm big, a bit bigger than the subject matter (the bowl is about 10cm in diameter.)

It has been quite some time since I have used watercolours, and in this work, I experimented with adding gum arabic to the paint to give it a gloss.  There is not much difference between these three stages, just a tweaking of the wash on the bowl, and cleaning up some of the details that got lost.

Figure 18

Figure 19

Kerry Daley, Settling In. Watercolour on Paper 18cm x 18cm © 2010

Overall, I am happy with the result.  If I had to paint this again though, I would definitely do the bowl first and the insects afterwards.  It was difficult to work on the bowl with the insects already painted, especially as I had used so much gum arabic, and the paint came off the paper very easily.

While trawling the net this week, I came across these great things:

• I loved the pictures on teescha's circus - wish that was my place!!
• I discovered these beautiful watercolour paintings by the artist Ali Cavanaugh, in the Watercolour Artist magazine (December 2009) and looked up her site. I particularly like Interior Light.
• I just LOVE andrea joseph's sketchblog.
• Watercolour Artist Diary by Tracy Hall is a great new blog that I am following on my google reader.
• Get free artist desktop wall papers at Artist Network.

I would like to thank Katherine Tyrell of Making a Mark and Darren Brant for visiting my blog and taking the time to leave a comment.