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Watercolour Animals

A set of recent sketches/studies of zoo animals I did to get better acquainted with my watercolours. We have a wonderful large zoo not too far away; the photos are from a few years ago, and I have been itching to use them as reference. One of my long-time problems is the simple arrangement of my subject on the paper I work on, they often ended up lopsided or not quite where they looked good. It was, as with so many issues, patience that solved it; the white goat was entirely redrawn when I found the shadow didn't sit well at the edge.
My experiments were obviously the elephant, where I tried to layer primary colours. Colour lifting is a bit new to me. Not too impressed with this particular result, the general idea is interesting however and I will explore further. The other experiment were the pelican group that didn't turn out like I wanted. The ref had a bloom of the white birds (actually pink, but only every so slightly) with the reflection being clearer, but I messed up the bloom effect. Then I tried to save the piece using white and that did other things than expected too. I still like the outcome but will try again.
As training to maybe even do plein-air painting someday, I tried hard to edit what I had on the references by leaving out, moving, and simplifying. I find it easy to just mechanically copy everything I see, and the results are technically good, but lifeless and not artsy like I want to. Maybe it's a curse of the realist fantasy painter.