The core part of advice when trying to improve your technique as an artist is to practice, but I find repetitive practice sketches can be really boring. I work a standard full-time office job, art is what I do for fun and as much as I want to improve my skills, I don’t really have the patience to draw hundreds of the same thing over and over until I can do it perfectly.

I wanted to set myself a challenge which would include drawing animals and loose abstract mixed-media techniques. I’ve previously set myself timebound challenges (see Tiny Art Challenge and Alphabet Art Challenge) but for this one I want to focus on just choosing images I like and enjoying the painting process.

I’ve started collecting pictures from Pixabay (a website for copyright free images and which doesn’t have the same issues of images being shared without consent as Pinterest sometimes does). The images need to show the whole animal and I’m trying to find 100 different animals, though there may end up being some duplicates. There won’t be any particular order to how I paint the images but as I’m going to keep this as a rolling series, I will update as and when I finish each painting.

I wanted to soak the paper in watercolour to help loosen up the background, adding colour with minimal control. I used a couple of different watercolour tubes mixed with water in a baking tray and then soaked each sheet. I left the paper to dry and then used this as the starting point.

Thanks,

Rachel