Watercolour

This my first art piece for the painting unit of this passion project. I used watercolour for the painting of the white leopard, and I am pretty happy with the way that it turned out. Like I said in my last post, I am not as comfortable with watercolour paint as I am with many other types of art, but I think I did an alright job regardless.

I have had a bit of experience with watercolour in the past, and I do like several things about it. First of all, I really like that you can create a lot of different shades from a single paint colour, just by adding water. In other types of paint, you would have to add a lot of white or black paint in order to change the darkness or lightness of a colour, which takes much more time and much more paint. Watercolour is a lot simpler and more enjoyable ( at least I found that it was) because you can simply use water instead. The more water is added to the paint on the pallet, the lighter the paint colour will be, and vise versa. For example, in my painting I only used one type of paint (black) for the whole thing, except for the eyes.
Another thing that I like about watercolour is that you barely need to use any paint at all. Because you mix it with water, all you need is a tiny dot of the colour you want. This is also nice because if you mix too much of a colour ( which is what usually happens to me) you don't really waste any paint.

One thing that I don't like to much about watercolour is the fact that the paint tends to run sometime. Since it is mostly water, it is a lot thinner than other paints, I had to be careful because the paint would sometimes drip. Also, at times I moved the paint brush too quickly, and as a reward I got a spray of little paint speckles all over the page. Luckily I managed to save the painting when this happened by quickly dabbing the spots up with paper towel before the watercolour happened to sink into the paper too much.
Also, you need to be careful with how many layers of paint or water you put onto the paper. If the paper gets too wet too many times, then it starts to "disintegrate" and the paper turns from nice and smooth to slightly rough and pulpy very quickly. I used artist paper that said would work well with all types of art, including watercolour, but I wonder if actual watercolour paper would be better.

This things can, however, be easily avoided if you are more careful and comfortable with watercolour paints.

The original painting of the leopard that I looked off I got from Pinterest. The artists name isn't given, but the painting is originally from silverridgestudio on a webpage called Etsy.