You Had Me At Kittens

Oh watercolor! How I love it and hate it! I've been working for the past 6 months or so to improve my skills. I can see the progress, but there's still more to go.

When I saw this project, I thought I could handle it and it would be good practice for me.

1. Inspiration Kitty

Since my kitty is not a big fan of photos, I didn't have a good one for her. I typed "fluffy cats" into Google and BAM! Here's my inspiration:

I hope to do this again with some more animals soon because it was fun!

2. Sketch

Like Olga said, I was more concerned with proportions and size in my sketch and didn't go crazy into detail.

3. Color Palette

I have a very small little kit of watercolors, so this made my choices pretty easy. I went with Cad Yellow, Cad Red Pale (really more orange than anything), Alizarin Crimson, Intense Blue, and Emerald Green.

Ultramarine Blue is also on the top, but I never ended up using it.

4. First Layer

I realized very quickly that I probably should have consolidated the catchlights into one larger spot. Other than that, I felt like this went pretty well. I tried to keep the darker values on the shadow side and where the fur was actually darker.

5. Final Result

I did not get the eyes quite right (shape of the pupil and shape of the eye to get that sad look). I also wished I could have loosened up a little more. I'm always aiming for tight pieces, which was part of the reason I wanted to try this class out. I'm planning to do a few more pieces in the next few days to experiment with some of Olga's other techniques and hopefully loosen up. Overall a really fun project!