This is the last of the paintings I did as a student for Molly Murrah’s Watercolor Magic. If you ever watch the class videos you’ll occasionally hear my voice making comments or asking questions. You’ll also see the painting exercises I did as part of the class.

Molly is doing a new Watercolor Course starting soon. The live sessions are free to attend and can be watched here starting at 10 am (Seattle time). I’m not one of the students this time around but I’ll be relaying comments and questions from the class chatroom so you might hear my voice during the broadcast.

I like the color on this one.

The final week of the Watercolor Course wasn’t as satisfying as the previous ones. That’s no slight on the teacher. The trouble was that I’d started to feel enough mastery over the medium that I just wanted to paint what I wanted to paint. I didn’t feel like doing more exercises. I was a little more ambitious with the side paintings I planned and felt a little frustrated that I didn’t have time to work on them. I was in class as a proxy for creativeLIVE’s online audience so it was inappropriate for me to ignore the assigned work to do my own thing.

This one didn’t get finished.

Toward the end of the session of the third week of the Watercolor Course I’d either finished the paintings I’d started or they were still too wet to do any further work on them so I pull out this piece from the first week and added a background.

After yesterday’s ramble you’d think I’d have something more to say about this one. But no.

I did my favorite paintings on the third week of class. At point I’d gotten used to the paints and tools enough that I could begin to predict what sort of image I’d be able to end up with.

I’m not that big a fan of stories of anthropomorphic animals. I enjoy Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and company but I have a harder time wrapping my mind around them when they appear in serious works like Omaha the Cat Dancer, Hepcats and Grandeville. In those works the animal nature of the characters is usually intended metaphorically. The characters are cats, monkeys, badgers and whatnot only up to a point. The question of how a civilization of multiple sentient animal species (many of which are prey to each other in our world) arose is pretty much ignored. I have a tendency to world build down to tiny details in my own work and to deconstruct the worlds built in stories of other writers and artists. The closer the story is drawn to “reality” the harder a time I have in just accepting it.

One of the few anthropomorphic adventure comics that I’m able to read without getting bogged down in questions of why a horse and canary are the same size (and having sex) is Usagi Yojimbo. That one probably works for me because Stan Sakai’s art is blatantly cartoony. I can take it seriously because the art isn’t realistic. Go figure.

Anyway, here’s a dog in a suit.

Whenever I practice with a new medium I fall back on drawing familiar things – human faces and monsters. Usually familiar monsters. So, in the second week of the Watercolor Magic course I did this odd colored Man-Thing.

This is a painting I did on the second week (of five) in Molly Murrah’s Watercolor Magic Course. I’m not too crazy about the pieces I did that day. I was mostly sketching directly with the paint and trying to figure out what colors worked (and didn’t work) well together.