Meditating Buddha watercolor

Another Christmas gift...for my wife to put into her meditation room. This was started about 8 months ago with a sketch of Buddha. Next, I drew a pencil outline of the buddha and painted just the background in a wet-on-wet style.Then it sat for about 6 months.  One of the reasons I've been practicing portraits is so I could feel confident in finishing this piece.  The hands are still the part that trips me up, and these where in a particularly challenging position. This is one of those paintings that I could continue tweeking, but at some point I had to say I was finished.

Animal watercolor: portrait of a cat

I created this painting of our pet cat for a Christmas gift for my daughter. I think the most challenging part of the process was getting our cat to sit still long enough to get a photo of her! Once I had the photo, I worked directly from the photo to create the painting. To create the  texture of the fur I added some white back in. I love the eye color that I got. It really captures her actual eye color. I am always challenged with mixing accurate colors. Working with landscapes, nature colors are much more forgiving, while portrait colors are not.  The rest of the cat's coloring was easy since it is just black and white!
This will probably be the first of many animal paintings....

Portrait of a guitar player in watercolor

It seems like it's been forever since I have posted anything...over a month! Where did November go? Anyways, I'm back to creating, and what better way than at Patris Studio and Art Gallery with a free 2nd Saturday long pose.  I am developing more confidence with portraits as I continue practicing.  The challenge that I have is developing the right skin tone  (as you can see from my test patches at the bottom) and then not having it look flat.  One of the other artists there gave me some pointers and suggested adjusting skin tone for different areas of the face... adding a little yellow to lighten the skin tone and green  to darken the skin tone. Sounded odd but I think it turned out well. And I was pleased with the hand too! (Something else that I needed to practice.) The whole eye-liner thing seems to have worked too!