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.

Earlier this year my day job broadcast an online watercolor class taught by Molly Murrah. In order to be sure that we had a regular set of students each week I volunteered to take the class. I may have been drawing most of my life but I don’t have a lot of practice working with paint – watercolor, acrylic or oil. I ended up enjoying working with watercolors. They require a bit more patience and planning than I’d like. It’s really a good idea if you think about what you want the final painting to look like while at the same time expecting it to turn out different. And you need to wait for the paints to dry between colors if you want to avoid a brown sloppy mess.

We did a number of in class exercises that I won’t be subjecting you to. I’m a fidgety sort and having paints in front of me was too tempting to ignore. What you will be getting over the next few days are the paintings (and sketches) that I did before class and during the time that Molly was lecturing about history, technique, tools and other things.

This is the first painting I did on the first week of class. Molly paints fruit when she’s practicing. Apparently I paint fruit monsters.