Lesson 49 Whimsical Animals

The challenge for this lesson was to create a series of four paintings of farm animals which might be appropriate for greeting cards or a children's book. Sometimes it is as difficult to create a drawing that looks simple and whimsical as it is to paint something more realistically. We began by doing a series of quick two minute studies from photographs of farm animals. For the first group we did contour, outline drawings with pen; for the second group we used brush and puddles of paint to do quick silhouettes. For the final drawings we sketched in pencil, outlined in ink and added a flat, wet wash which we tried to keep 'out of register' with the pen lines.

Claire left lots of white but we are still able to make sense of the pose.

Nancy added bits of red in the wet wash on the sheep.

Jeff left unpainted areas on the face and back and worked with two colors in his wash.

Carrie used different weight pen lines and bold green color for her goat.