Ural owl in watercolours.

Is it odd to miss winter? Well, I do. As soon as that quicksilver start to climb up in the mid 30 degrees area I do long for the cooler days of winter. I never liked hot weather much, and especially not humid hot weather... Oh well. I only have to endure it for 2 months, and then I will spend a few weeks in Finland. I am already looking forward to go 'home'. And this time I want to get some nice landscape photos, so that I have more reference material to paint from. I do have quite a lot of photos from home, but I have never taken photos of the landscape with paintings in mind. And I think I would love to have that. So I have a plan for this summer!

But before any of that I have a watercolour to share with you today. I thought it would be fun to share the development of a painting from idea to the finished painting.

I was browsing through the free images on Pixabay and found this lovely Ural owl. I got an image of it in my head that I wanted to try out, and I did just that in my big art journal. Or I guess I have to start calling it my sketch book now as I do not do much of journaling in it anymore. I used to paint on the right page and then write down my ideas on the left. But lately I have started to paint on both sides with very little writing to accompany it.

Anyway, I was very happy with my sketch and I thought it worked very well. I then drew the owl on hot pressed cotton paper.

The background consists of only three colours: Indigo blue, Payne's grey and Sepia. My three favourite colours... The lovely texture in it is made with salt.

This cropping of the painting is my favourite I think. It shows me that I don't always need to paint the whole bird. That's an idea for the next one I think...

And here we have the finished painting. Ural owl. You can probably tell by my tone that I am very pleased with it. It is just such a happy feeling to finally make art that I am really seeing myself in. It has taken me quiet a few years of experimenting. And I am still experimenting, but now when I feel that I am heading in the right direction I can try and develop my painting skill more.