All of this writing, and I haven’t shown my actual paintings yet! What?! Well, today’s the day to fix that. Welcome to my first artwork showcase. And no, there are no swatches.

I painted this delightful duck derriere last week, as I was wrapping up my latest sketchbook. I needed something to fill out a small space in a spread from my France trip — ideally, something from that same day. As I flipped back through my memories and photos, I recalled watching the ducks diving for their meal, spinning about without a care in the world. They must have been famished — they were bottoms-up in all the pictures I had from that day! And so, I decided to paint them just as my camera captured them.

Now, this might be the time to say that I consider myself very much a beginner in watercolor still. I know some things, but I will always be learning something new! And there are still plenty of things I haven’t tried yet. Birds (or animals in general) are subjects I have not explored. At all. I haven’t even watched a single tutorial (and I’m generally an over-analyzer!). So, diving into this duck painting, I was a little intimidated. I decided that in the worst-case scenario, a complete failure, I could always just paste something over this space (I do this a lot in my sketchbooks!). And so, I dug right in.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out! I chose to try to balance warm and cool for the soft shadows on the underbelly. I feel that I was able to give the duck’s body decent form. However, there are a couple of changes I’d make if I was doing this again:

1. The colors — I used primarily W&N French Ultramarine and W&N Burnt Sienna, for both the duck body and the water. I do think these were the perfect colors for the duck, but might have selected something with a bit more green for the water to differentiate a bit.
2. The water — I would have liked some more wet-in-wet application here. I think the paper was starting to go off in some places, so I struggled to keep it consistently wet.
3. The colors where the feet touch the water — I don’t know if there’s a proper term for this, but the point at which something enters the water is extra dark. I captured this on the duck body, but not on the feet. They look like they just kind of disappear. This should be an easy fix if I’m ever inspired to pull this out.