I enjoyed having a prompt list for 2022 but found juggling work and other life commitments alongside more than 50 prompts a bit much, so I wanted a shorter list. I also wanted to be able to create larger pieces and to focus more on capturing the details and movement of the animals. Thus, the 2023 Alphabet Art Challenge was created, based on the simple premise of painting an animal for each letter of the alphabet at some point in the new.
I started with A (of course), painting an African Wild Dog on A3 paper and quickly discovered; I had used the wrong paper, A3 was way too large and would take months to finish, black ink was too harsh as a background, and too much details makes the painting seem stiff. So overall not very successful.
I changed tack and started on a new version of the series. For each painting I've found the below process to work best (after some initial fine-tuning):
Rough pencil sketch
Mock up on my tablet
Pencil outline on the paper
Go over the pencil outline with Gold Pebeo Acrylic Liner
Watercolour wash for the background
Fill in the details with watercolour
Reapply the gold liner (the watercolour always gets on to the edges and looks messy and its really hard to remove it without removing the surrounding watercolour)
Add a hint of gold leaf to help focus the eye and add dimension to the painting
The Alphabet Animals
Choosing the animals was sometimes harder than expected, either because I found it hard to find inspiring animals for the letter or struggled to decide how best to depict them, but eventually I settled on the below list:
Thanks,
Rachel