Yikes! I really struggled with painting this week. This first painting was initially really off, proportionally. So I sprayed it with a fixative thinking I could seal off the paint underneath and just go over it without completely redoing the painting. Boy was I wrong. It turns out, once you spray watercolor paper with fixative, it isn’t very absorbent anymore. The gouache just beaded up on the paper. So to further fix my mess, I painted over the whole thing with watercolor ground. The ground smeared a bit of the paint underneath and was semi opaque, but it made it possible to continue on.

I sketched out my subject again, this time correcting my proportions, and blocked in my main colors. Once everything was blocked in, I found myself actually liking how rough this painting looked. I like that you can still see most of my red sketch lines, and the details are minimal, but effective. All in all, I actually really love how this painting turned out. Way better than the previous version, which looked like a classically bad Jesus painting.

This second painting was just simple and pleasurable to paint. I felt like I owed myself something easy after my last struggle. It doesn’t come off super well in the photo, but I used silver metallic and copper metallic gouache to really put the shine on the beetle. This little guy is really striking in person. I love it. A joy from start to finish.