"Simple mind, plain scales, quiet and unremarkable. Mighty heart, poet's soul, more than meets the eye."
The past few weeks I've been hit with a pretty bad artblock which made me not even want to pick up my pencils. However I did hear that changing the art medium for a while can help getting through blocks like that. So I decided to try doing some watercolor paintings. I haven't used watercolors since elementary school, in high school we mainly stuck to tempera and frankly I was never good with that. Even now other than that painting of Shadow I pretty much hated everything else I made because it all looked so sloppy. Thus I did not have much faith in this project, but to my surprise I am actually quite pleased with the result. The color blending went much smoother and the detailed brushwork is also a lot steadier than my usual works. Might be because watercolors are lighter than tempera and thus in a way easier to work with? In any case this did boost my confidence and I want to try painting a few more things. Though from now on I won't be drawing the scales anymore if I don't intend to paint over them exactly as they are since seeing the pencil through the paints really doesn't look nice.

As for the subject of my work, I decided to paint prince Turtle from the Wings of Fire series. Turtle is one of my favorite characters from the series, which is funny because at first I didn't really care about him at all. He was quiet, boring, and just seemed flat. But then I read Talons of Power and after learning why he was like this I've grown very fond of him. In my opinion he's a very well developed character and reading a book from his perspective (especially from the situation he was in) has been very intriguing. I kinda find him quite relatable too to be honest. XD


Turtle © Tui T. Sutherland