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Watercolor Painting & Illustration

Of all the painting mediums, watercolor is my favorite. I love the soft colors and the random, happy accidents you get around drying paint edges.

I especially love combining watercolor with black ink line work.

"Radish flowers" Watercolor Illustration

I let some radishes go to seed in my garden and I never realized just how beautiful their flowers were. I decided to paint a watercolor picture of them.

"Waffles" Watercolor Illustration

An illustration of my friend's cute dog.

"Summer and the Duke" Watercolor portrait

This is a portrait of my youngest son, Summer, riding his Mum's dog, 'The Duke'.

"Backyard chair" Watercolor painting

This is from the backyard of my old house. We had a beautiful green bushy plant that grows along our side brick wall covering a little chair and a table. in spring, beautiful orangy-red flowers come out and almost completely cover it.

While I was painting this I noticed a little bird was making a nest in the bush. It kept coming and going with little twigs - very cute!

I'm getting better each time I give watercolor a go.

I started this painting with some light washes of colour and slowly built up the darks. The flowers turned out more purple than orange but it still looks ok. The bricks are my favourite part — they are just simple rectangle shapes.

"Gaara of the desert" Black ink and watercolor illustration

Gaara is a really interesting manga character. I painted this especially for one of my friends as a going away present. It was done on really rough watercolor paper and you can see the texture in this scan.

"Tesselating flowers" Watercolor Illustration

I painted this section of flowers so I could make a repeating pattern for the background of a website.

Here's how it eventually looked once I made the tesselating image in Photoshop, I changed the colors to brown too.

"Felicity the creeping fairy" Watercolor Illustration

This is just a quick painting of a fairy from my mind. I wanted to try out some sepia ink that I had bought and I needed something to draw.

I made an effort to put in as much anatomy as I could and even though it's not exactly right I think it has really improved the picture.

"Sai with messy hair" Watercolor & black ink portrait

This is a painting of my friend Sai. She has very curly hair that's always a bit messy. She tries to straighten it but I think it looks a lot better when it's all crazy and untamed.

I love her hair in this image. In fact I think it really makes the painting work. Straight hair would not have the same impact.

Sai is also an amazing artist, follow her on Instagram.

"Subdued Crystal" Watercolour and ink illustration in muted colors

I painted this watercolor picture of Crystal to use as part of the design for a new version of this website but I didn't use it after all. I was inspired by the beautiful watercolor art by Arthur Rackham and his subdued colour schemes.

"Elfin girl" Watercolor illustration

This is a watercolor illustration with two layers; the black lines were done afterwards in CorelDraw that's why they look so smooth and perfect. I like the effect when you combine digital and analogue painting methods.

See more of my vector art

"Teu Dream" Watercolor portrait

Teu Dream (pronounced 'to dream') is a character I was developing . My plan was to use her in short comics illustrating the many weird dreams I have.

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