The Story of The Picture
Submitted by Jennifer J.
FOR THE WAUSAU TIMES
I was teaching an art class on watercolor, and the subject was painting animals. The students choose any animal that they wanted to paint. We had magazines and old calendar pictures to reference from. To teach the class drawing and then painting the animal, I choose the cat.
Not everyone was drawing/painting cats; some students were drawing penguins, dogs, birds, whatever their choice and attraction was.I drew a light outline of the animal, but only a light outline, because the watercolor paints I chose were lighter colors. I finished the painting quickly because there was only one coat of watercolor. I liked the cat’s eye color, and made the eyes the focal point of the picture.
Mistakes I made on the picture were easily corrected. After the painting dried, there was an uncolored white spot by the cat’s ear, so I just used a slightly wet brush to fill in color from the surrounding orange background. I also felt that cat’s whiskers needed to be filled in to balance the picture, so I just used a black ink pen to quickly draw in whiskers under the chin and on the cheeks.
Using a different technique, I cut the cats picture down to size and spray-glued it in an existing frame over an existing picture I wasn’t fond of. The frame for this lighter color picture was of course, white, because it kept the focal point on the cat’s eyes.