‘Flamingo’s Friend Part Two’

I often get asked, ‘how do you come up With your ideas for your paintings?’

Well, I don’t have a crazy story where I discovered a Flamingo on a beach or experienced a Whale encounter, I really just think of these ideas. I know, its not that exciting but when an idea comes to mind, I quickly run off to sketch it down in my little sketchbook to develop it later.

To be honest, I really wanted create another Flamingo painting that continued on the story of my first Flamingo Painting. Using the legs became a good way of having someone interact with the Flamingo.

Most of the time I will check out Pinterest to get some inspiration for a painting and gather imagery I can use to combine into that scene.

So for this one I combined an image of the Flamingo with the image of a girl in the hammock, I know, thats fairly simple. From there I will loosely sketch it at A3 size and work on refining the shapes and lines. I use an old school method of transferring the pencil sketch onto a new watercolour sheet of paper. If you apply hard pencil on the reverse side of the paper where the image is, you can then retrace the image onto the watercolour paper underneath. this gives you a very faint pencil impression of the picture in which you can redraw the image. This saves a lot of time and you always get a very accurate impression of your original sketch. Of course a Lightbox will also work as just as effective if you have an A3 one.

For this painting, I was aiming for a very light blue sky to fill the page. I use Gouache paint to fill this area to get a very flat background with a bit of texture. You need to use a lot more Gouache than watercolour paint as Gouache is more opaque than watercolour. I’m very happy with the result of the painting and experimenting with Gouache. I did not want the background to be 100% perfect and wanted some texture of the paint and paper to show through.