This was one of the first things I started working on when I got my new set of watercolor paints... about a year ago. I've finished several other things with them since then as this painting always ended up lower in priority than other paintings.

That is, until Oni said that she would be in the Bay Area for the GDC conference this March.
As the sketch this came from was drawn for Oni for the 10 Minute Sketch Meme I did in 2008, I figured that I should complete it in time to present to her when we met up in San Francisco.

This painting was really an experiment and a way to get to know my new paints and practice with brushes and painting in general. There's a lot of things I did wrong, but there's also quite a few things I did right or learned and so on the whole I consider it a net gain.

One of the things I did wrong was leaving it out on the light-table to dry for a while without covering it somehow. There's cat fur embedded into the paint. XD

Also I wanted to experiment with this "salt" thing I've seen HaikuJaguar do but I couldn't find rock salt at the time. Also the paper is canvas paper and therefore quite textured. Putting table salt on the wet paint didn't have quite the right outcome and now there's salt in there too.

This was also my first experiment using Frisket!

On the whole, it could have been better planned (reflections in water, better lighting/shadows, better background, better anatomy) but for an experiment a lot of things went right (water came across better than expected, layering to build up colors in the fur was rewarding, throwing things at the background - including dumping a bunch of black on and then tilting the paper while it was still wet - was super fun, THAT TREE).

Plus I got to give it to someone in person, and that's always excellent. :)