Whenever I start a new project, I have an idea in my mind of the ‘thing’ that I am trying to communicate - an idea, feeling or quality that I want the final piece to communicate. For this one, it was ‘delicacy’ - I wanted to communicate with only the lightest touches of paint on paper, to bring across the camouflaged contours of the snow hare. In the final result, I am not sure I managed that.

I started with a study of the hare on newsprint, before outlining on a stretched piece of Cold Press.  The only difficulty was that I didn’t have a soft, easy spreading purple, but I thought I’d try to manage with the other paints.

My feeling, almost as soon as I put paint to paper, was that I was going too hard - admittedly, it is very hot and stuffy where I am, which required some rapid re-wetting, but I felt that even my first touches had put too much paint to paper, were to heavy, and needed some lifting. I tried to build up the darks on the side of the body, with the same issue - building up the browns was slightly easier, but the light side of the body was darker than I really wanted. I also left the face reasonably light as I kept making it too dark and having to lift, and felt that I was overworking that area.

The final result isn’t bad - I’ve shown it to some friends, and they thought it was cute and some even said it was ‘delicate’, but it wasn’t right, not to me…

Whenever something doesn’t go quite right, I tell myself, ‘plan to paint everything twice’ - I don’t always plan this, but it helps take the pressure off.

I redrew the hare on a block of gummed paper I’m trying to use up (I prefer stretched) and tried painting on an angle, to let the darks spread a bit more naturally.

OK, less said about this one the better (somehow the silhouette looks more like a giant white rat than the hare and the colour transitions, while subtle, still managed to give a hard outline on the left side). I think I got too much into my head in the second one, and still managed to miss that sense of delicacy.

Over the last six months or so I’ve come to accept that my pieces can be spiky in quality - I’ve done some pieces that I am really proud of and some that can be safely filed under ‘character development’ - this probably goes in the second category, and I am posting it here hoping for some feedback on what I could pay attention to (either in the process or final touches) in my next piece (and the next, and the next) to bring that sense of real delicacy across.