Happy World Seal Day!

Did I ever tell you I wrote a story about a clam who fights an entire herd of elephant seal bulls off his beach? No? Well, I did. Ask to see it and I’ll send you the link.

Learning: I’ve never liked when watercolors leave an opaque film over black lines. Not being a watercolorist, I’ve never had to deal with this. But now that I’m practicing, jeeeeeez. Bugs the heck out of me. In the dragon’s mouth above, you can see where the line looks slightly gray. I tried diluting the yellow overlaying the ink, but then the color in the dragon’s face got washed out.

The same thing happened along the dragon’s back. The yellow covered the scales, I attempted to dilute it but ended up making the ink (which I thought was dry) bleed. You can see a slight gray wash there.

I noticed this effect is most pronounced with yellows. Not just that it’s the brightest color but I think there’s something chemical in the pigment that reacts differently over ink. The yellows seem to pool over the black, blues almost avoid it, like there’s a some sort of repellant charge in the pigment’s ions. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. And I am having fun, even if I’m sure my face while painting looked something like this:

I like his horns and those clouds. His dewlap in shadow, too. Not sure about the rest, though.

Didn’t mention yesterday that I intend to do one of these small watercolor sketches every day. I want to get better at watercolors and messing around like this seems to be the way to go. Here’s today’s, inspired by a hike with @grubreport.

I’d like to apologize to the Ides of March for suggesting they deleted my previous site and all the content therein. In reality, it was me and my inability to approach web design with patience. I carelessly overwrote my entire website while test running a Wix style website builder. It all worked out for the best, though, because while waiting for WordPress to reinstall, I went in the search for a completely new design style and remembered seeing a collage illustration of a cat I liked on Eija Sumner’s website. I went there to look for it and found instead that Eija had redesigned her site with the very smart Alexa theme from WordPress. I tried it out here and found I liked it a lot.

So, here we are. Back up and running. Again, sorry Ides of March. To make it up, I wanted to make a sketch of you. But instead, I decided to draw a March metaphor that’s a little easier to personify.