Life's a Stitch

Elephants

Watercolour on Arches 300# paper

Unframed size: 16×20

Painted with techniques learned in class with Lian Quan Zhen

This is the painting I was working on in my last post, while sitting by the pool in California. I hadn’t thought about getting it home, but luckily it fit in my suitcase sandwiched between two sheets of dollar store foam board.

I knew I wanted to paint these elephants in a larger format, but watercolour paper is tricky. If you cut a standard size sheet into halves or quarters, your painting won’t fit a standard size mat and frame. This one was planned as part of a series, the first one being my mama and baby zebras, so I needed a standard size in order to match the previous frames. The math in that decision meant cutting a $17 sheet of paper to 16×20 with only enough paper left for two small 8×10 paintings.

I’ll definitely get a better photo to do prints and notecards of this one before selling it.

This painting was started a couple of weeks ago. Last week my son found out he’ll soon be filming an African photo safari. He showed the company’s owner my elephants in progress. “Wow, she said, your mom paints the future!” Hmmm, I’ll have to have a look at what else I’ve done recently. I know there were two sailboats…