Watercolour Pencils: Animals (Museum Sketching)

June 20, 2009 | Leave your thoughts

My two sketching friends(wendy and Alissa) and I found a wonderful place to go and sketch on a very wet winter’s day. It was a perfect way to test out our new watercolour pencil techniques (thanks to Kate’s class)

The Australian Museum in Sydney has a Search and Discover Section where we were able to pick whatever specimen we liked in the room and bring it to the bench we were sitting at and sketch – which is exactly what we did all day.

I have added the bird calls since arriving home and looking up my bird book – adds a little life to the dead animals we were sketching!

Not happy with either of these… didn’t get the lower feathers right (being lazy plus I don;t like the flatness of using a black pencil. So I did a really quick second sketch as well. I hope to try and sketch this again next visit as I really love black cockatoos!

 

Inspired by Wendy’s masterful handling of the Owl I tried to simplify my approach to feathers… it was a simpler bird as well- which helps!

 

Started this one of ‘Wendy’s bird’ while I was waiting for the first wash of the swamphen to dry – a great tip for curing impatience…work on two at once.
Ah! I have finally got the hang of this now!

 

I was really on a roll now and wanted to do a few more quick ones. I have since added a few ink outlines since scanning this one and might replace this.


Last sketch of the day… I significantly beefed the colours up when I got home and am happy with the final result especially the blue hints in the dark areas.
BTW this critters are about a foot long and hundreds of them live in the Botanical Gardens right in the city.

 

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