My second animal painting allowed me to test out some pro-markers that I had yet to use. They worked well for providing a good base coat on colour for the background areas

My first work into animal based paintings, starting with this panda piece. I chose a panda to start with to see how I can experiment with bleeding inks to create a fur like texture.

My Fifth animals watercolour project. I experimented with using copic markers on this piece to give the colour a boost in saturation which I think worked nicely to create a strong vibrant piece.

This dopey dog is a portrait of Boo Boo, my girlfriend’s dog. He’s clumsy but loveable

This stripey chap is a favourite of my animal pieces. The key thing with this piece is the simplicity, the zebra itself, (Equus quagga) was easy enough to paint, all it took was a blue base wash and white and black ink overlays, but combined with the splatter style background it makes for a great graphics style piece and nice composition.

Panthera leo better known as the Lion. One of my favourite animal experiment paintings, For the fur sections I bled colour tones of oranges, reds and yellows to create a firey autumn skin. The mane was a bit more challenging and took time as I painted each hair section individually using a thin brush and built up layers of colour to create depth.

This is the second of a set of pet portraits that I recently finished for a local dogsitters. I loved working on all four of these pieces and had great reference images to work from. Each piece is A3 and produced with watercolour paints and additionally acrylics were added to fill in the white areas and provide texture. This one was a fun composition to work with. Capturing any detail from the dog itself was difficult since a lot of it's face is covered, but the overall reference image was too cosy to not paint and I think it came out great.

My final watercolour piece of 2017. This piece is one of my favourites. Painted using watercolours and finished with soft pastels to smooth over areas of the fur, this piece takes what I have learnt through the entire animal painting project and applies the skills and techniques to this final piece. As it’s also winter I wanted to add a hint of the season with a new background technique developed from my penguin piece where in I softly blended cool tones together however this time I added drops of white watercolour to the colour while wet to create a soft blurred snowy effect

This painting is the second portrait of my girlfriend’s dogs. This is Blaze, she’s an Alsation crossed with a Border Collie. Had a lot of fun working on this piece as there is so much detail and hair to work with, meaning layering took a long time, but it was worth the result

A new animal based watercolour, this time I’ve painted a Silvertip bear, better known as a Grizzly. It’s a species of Brown bear typically found in North America and Canada and I chose this one to paint from based on the textures and facial expression of the subject. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between the ferocity of these creatures and the docile nature they also have.

I am very happy with this week's watercolour painting especially after feeling disapointed with last week's one. Initially I didn't think much of painting this Bongo, as an animal it's not one that I would consider interesting personally, but getting into painting it and scruitinizing the form I really enjoyed the process. What I like in particular with this painting is how simple the design is, but how elegant the end result came off. I didn't focus on blending techniques or experimentation or adding fine detail, and as a result the simplicity helps the piece speak for itself. I think it also helped that I didn't feel any pressure on this piece to make it look any particular way so I could just shut off and paint it naturally.

This is my second owl watercolour piece after enjoying working on the first so much. For whatever reason they translate really well to paintings. This time I worked on a barn owl, there's a lot less detail in these types as opposed to the spotted eagle owl, so I tried out a new background technique to help the animal stand out more. I think this piece has a fantasy based quality to it, mixing the subject matter and the background, it wasn't my initial aim, but I do like the end result.

Re-visiting a series I had done some work with in the past, these animal faces are specifically designed for prints and to look especially great on apparel. I wanted to try and emphasise colour in this piece since the panther itself is black so I focused on just painting the highlights and leaving the majority in darkness. I painted the highlights in purples and blues to give the colour some vibrancy and strong saturation, and they worked really well against the black. I initially considered just painting the highlights grey, but quickly realized that the piece would look much better with a stronger colour scheme.

This one was probably the most tricky piece since the dog itself has white fur. Obviously painting a white dog on white paper wouldn’t make for much to look at so to tackle this I painted an under painting of yellows and purples over the dog firstly, giving me a tone I could work with that shows through the transparent white. This also helped me with shading some areas since all I had to do was paint the highlights and leave the underpainting as shadowed areas.

A simple watercolour painting for this week, I tried to keep this piece mostly detail free and let the paint colour itself in by bleeding colours together and have them blend naturally. I enjoyed painting this one much more than I thought I would and I think a close up or more detailed painting could be fun to try.

This is the first of a set of pet portraits that I recently finished for a local dogsitters. I loved working on all four of these pieces and had great reference images to work from. Each piece is A3 and produced with watercolour paints and additionally acrylics were added to fill in the white areas and provide texture.

I was initially worried about the level of detail in this piece, with all the feathers being the right formation and colour tones, but with some layering and switching my pointer brush to a flat head, I found an easy and effective approach to the feathers. I enjoyed this piece and I think I'll try and do another Owl painting soon.

Here’s my second cat watercolour painting.

After success with my Zebra piece, I wanted to try and re-create that same style with another piece this time with a giraffe.

Another watercolour painting for my collection of Animal and Nature pieces. I initially struggled with this piece, I think the reference image I used to work from wasn’t the best, but the end result turned out alright. I also used Faber Castell pencils on this piece to soften the brush strokes with the help of a fellow artist who specializes in pencil work.

This piece was done using watercolour paints and finished with soft pastels to give it a furry coat texture. I think this piece worked really well, because it captures the furry textures well in certain areas of the figure and wirey fur around the face. The colours were also really nice to work with

This latest watercolour painting is a portfolio bulding piece of my cat for examples of more cat commissioned pieces.

This watercolour painting is an example piece for Horse commissions. I previously had success with similar pieces of a Zebra and a Giraffe so I thought trying a horse next would open up some new commission avenues whilst using skills I have learnt through painting other animals. I am glad with the end result, To create this painting I used puddles of paint to blend whilst on the paper to provide a variety of colours and tones I was worried I’d tear or crease the paper using my painting method but luckily it came out fine.

I've not painted a wildlife illustration for a while, so I thought I would revisit birds as a theme and maybe build a calendar around them. I chose a magpie to paint because recently when I had the opportunity to observe one more closely I saw that their feathers are full of vibrant colours beneath what is seen as a black and white bird. I wanted to put emphasis on the colours of blues and purples in this piece and reach a high saturation without it looking too false. The background was a last minute addition, originally I intended on leaving it blank, but it looked too empty and simple so I added the coloured splatter which has helped tie the piece together.

I enjoyed working on this Orangutan piece, I think the pose of the figure works really well in displaying their laid back demeanor. I also wanted to make the colours pop in this piece to enhance the outcome of the prints

Continuing my current work on bird paintings, I decided to give this african grey parrot a try. The feather patterns are much more complex than those of the owls, so more practice on these is probably the plan.

Just finished this painting, it was barely dry by the time I was scanning it in. I’m not too fond of this piece, The techniques I used to paint this didn’t work too much in my favour and the overall result came out more messy than I planned. The idea was to create a vibrant, marble like watercolour to reflect the peacock’s colour scheme, but the watercolours would bleed and simply not dry quickly enough to create random colour variations. I think part of the probem was the composition here, since the body of the peacock is relatively small when the feathers are included and although they are part of the main characteristic associated with peacocks, there’s a lot of blank space and un-interesting colour in the feather area.

I had fun working on this artctic based watercolour painting. Given that the penguin itself has quite a simple colour scheme, I wanted a background that would really bring out the figure in a burst of colour.

This is the third of a set of pet portraits that I recently finished for a local dogsitters. I loved working on all four of these pieces and had great reference images to work from. Each piece is A3 and produced with watercolour paints and additionally acrylics were added to fill in the white areas and provide texture.

This Raccoon piece was developed with T-Shirt prints in mind primerally and it’s another development on my wildlife work.

Had a lot of fun painting this little guy, Had another experiment with the spray background technique but tried to make sure the focus was on the Red Panda. I finished this piece off with some soft pastels in places to give the fur a fluffy texture similar to what I did with my fox piece from a while ago.

Getting into the Christmas spirit with this watercolour painting. I always enjoy painting birds because they allow for a lot of texture and brush experimentation, this one focusing on colour bleeding and a paint puddle kind of technique. Seasonal card variations of this design will be available over Christmas, so be sure to check the print store for these.

My final commission of 2017, this lovely Bull Terrier was requested by the winner of my Christmas contest.

Just a quick and simple watercolour piece for this week. Having the challenge of painting a Sea Lion seemed like the result for a portrait would be too simple, since their forms are minimal and they don’t really have a texture or colour variation. So instead, I focused on composition for this piece using 3 Sea Lion pose references and working a background in to bring it all together. The end result is this piece which I think is quite a fun one and I’ve been referencing it as a hip hop album kind of homage.

I'm back with the faces this week, this time a follow up to a previous Tiger piece only this time I've painted a white tiger instead. When I first planned on doing this piece, I was just going to work digitally on top of the original, however I quickly realized there's more diferences between these tigers than just the colour of their fur. To do this piece I started with a base of blues, purples and yellows and then (the time consuming part) I painted the fur texture by scraping away white acrylic paint using a cocktail skewer. It may be difficult to see in this scanned version, but each area of the white fur has a raised line texture. I had to do this so that the colours wouldn't end up flat and dull and I found a brush was too broad for t

I initally planned on this piece being my usual watercolour based animal painting, but as I inked the background, I noticed that the brush strokes created the perfect texture to match the rest of the painting. Creating a dry brush texture in watercolours is do-able, but it’s much easier using a fast drying paint, so I went back to using acrylics which I originallly focused my paint work. I had a great time working on this, and the texture I got from the acrylic paint worked much better than the watercolour would have produced. I finished the piece using some soft pastel blending and pencils to add some small detail and shading to the piece without loosing the brush marks from the paint.