Watercolour and Pen Demonstration by Elise Hendry

  Elise told us that she likes doing animal portraits and the one she was going to demonstrate was of a Field Mouse done in one of her brown sketchbooks. In this instance she was working on a grey mount board.

She started by sketching out the picture with a white gel pen before adding some background colour in watercolour paint. Using Lemon Yellow around the shape, some of the white outlines vanish a little. At this stage she used colours such as, Carmine Red and Indigo very loosely; keeping the edges soft. She then did some more drawing with the gel pen before adding colour to the mouse.

Next, she added some dark around the mouse before adding some of the berries; varying the colours slightly  and adding some darks to the negative spaces around them.  A brown pen was then used to add some fur  and a  white one to bring out some highlights on the berries.

After adding the eyes with a black marker, she continued to build up definition to different areas.  Again with the black pen, shadows were added where needed and these were smudged with a finger  for a softer look. 

She continued to use gel pens in order to add the fur as well as the whiskers.  Next, she gave the  berries more definition.

 A fascinating demonstration, although it was a shame that feedback on the audio visual equipment stopped it being shown on the screen. Elise worked hard and even had to do some of her work upside down, so people could see. 

It was also interesting to see the demonstration done on the grey mount board, especially within a restricted time frame and to be able to compare and contrast it with the original painting.
There was a good turn out for this event, which was nice to see. Let's hope this may continue.