Last week  I showed you a couple of birds I’d painted when I stumbled across a series of free loose bird painting tutorials, made by Tom Sheppard. Continuing with this series I’ve now painted a Kingfisher…

…and a goldfinch…

I then decided to branch out on my own and paint the original a loose blue tit, I meant to learn to paint from this series, without even looking at Tom’s blue tit tutorial.

Almost immediately I started I was kicking myself for wetting the breast first and not using broken brush strokes on dry paper like Tom had taught me. I moved on and painted the rest wet on dry. Then I looked back at the whole bird – yes, I know I should have taken a picture to show you – and realised that when I painted the breast I’d defaulted to the process and style I really love; wet on wet.

Yes, Tom’s birds are beautiful. Broken brush strokes are beautiful. But I’m not Tom and I what I love is the wet in wet process and the look of watercolour when it does it’s ‘watercoloury thing’.

I then rather botched the bird to try and make it look more like my sort of painting. It’s certainly far from a masterpiece, but here it is; neither the way I’d learned from the bird series  or the way my heart would have chosen to paint it!

Hopefully next time I show you a blue tit painting it will be painted from my heart. Having said that, I certainly learnt some things from Tom – thank you Tom –  and no doubt you’ll be seeing the odd broken brush stroke in my work, but from here on in, (mostly) more soft, more watercoloury pictures.

Until next time,

Bekki x