Be Brave With Colour

English Bull Terrier
Watercolour on Paper
21.5cm x 26cm (8.5" x 10.25")

The subject for the May meeting of the Shelford Group of Artists was Be Brave with Colour. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the exercise Tony Slater had planned. He started by laying a tarpaulin over the floor. We mixed up a load of paints, wet our paper and then tipped the contents of our palettes over the paper.

After the paint had settled and dried, we tried to identify imagery in the mixtures of colours. We spent the rest of the sessions bring these subjects to life.

I couldn’t see anything in my wash apart from a variety of animal faces - everything from a little bunny to a hippopotamus. Tony was keen on the hippopotamus, but I decided on the English Bull Terrier. The deciding factor was that I have a blurry photo of one on my laptop and I didn’t fancy painting a hippopotamus (or any animal) without some kind of reference material.

I developed the picture with the techniques I used when painting  Moo! and Jack. I was a little rusty and could benefit from watching Jean Haines' Amazing Ways with Watercolour DVD again.

It’s not a masterpiece, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon and it’s inspired me to paint some more animals - I'm particularly inspired to model the physique of the dog.