An 8×10” watercolor commission.
When I started to refine my ability to paint more realistically with watercolor, I began to receive more interest in commissioned pieces similar to the examples I was posting.
I think it’s perhaps a little less common to go so refined, realistic, and detailed with watercolor, as it is a medium that particularly lends itself well to impressionism. It can be difficult to control and sometimes thrives when the artist gives into unpredictability.
However, there is also something to be said for how the medium portrays light and color can be conducive to portraying the translucency of someone’s skin, the delicacy of their hair, and the intimate connection in their eyes- whether the subject is human or animal.
I will say though, sometimes amidst the pursuit of realism, I find myself focusing too much on details, and struggle with finishing a piece. I spoke a bit about this in my previous blog post, highlighting how necessary it is to let go of perfectionism when it comes to drawing live, something I do often as a live portrait artist.
As long as something reads well visually you definitely do not need to make sure it’s rendered to absolute hyper-realistic perfection; most people aren’t going to scrutinize your work under a magnifying class, and even if they did, I find it to be quite impressive that the illusion of realism can come from a rendering that appears more vague when you’re up close.
Although my career is largely focused on furthering my reach in the wedding and events industry through live guest portraits (as well as live wedding painting!), I’m excited to continue doing commissioned watercolor pieces. This particular piece was fun to work on- the dog is beautiful, and I go to go into very fine detail with all the little tiny gray-black strokes. I enjoy painting black fur because there is much more to black than simply black- my first pass of color with black is often various shades of blue, sometimes even a warm red or orange depending on the lighting. It can be tricky to represent white material too, whether that’s fur, fabric, or hair- I try to capture the light bouncing off of it and made sure to add some green in the dog’s chest.
The painting above was commissioned by a client as a painting for his wife as a part of a series of four. Lately I’ve been learning a little more about the properties of the pigments I’m working with, and it’s fun to see which pigments produce more granulation (the separation of pigment into larger particles, making the speckled texture seen in the suit and dress).
I struggled with the piece below at first- I actually had about seven passes (definitely before I finally was able to land on a rendition that I felt did the client justice. Those paintings weren’t painted to completion- I was mostly struggling with painting the background wash on the bigger size, something I wasn’t entirely comfortable with yet, and finally I decided to downsize (I think it went from 12×16” to something like 11×14”.
Thankfully I, and most importantly my client, were satisfied with the final result!
I hope to keep pushing myself with rendering realism, even though I don’t intend to go for hyper-realism (I enjoy preserving some of the natural, loose quality of brush strokes, and I also like when you look closely you can see that you are looking at paint).
