Watercolor Wednesday: July/August Paints and Sketches

So this month has actually been a decent one for artwork (albeit most of the paintings in this post are due to last weekend). Commence the art-sharing!

This first piece is a watercolor postcard I made for a friend's birthday this week (and this is the reason I swapped Watercolor Wednesday and ThrowBook Thursday--to allow the card to make it to its recipient). The card is a mixture of a Ray Bradbury quote and an I am the Messenger reference.

Happy birthday, Bella!

The next two images are more postcards, both experimenting with some techniques and colors. The first was a chance to try out one of the brushes in my set that allows you to do fun textures (seen at the bottom). The second was trying out the browns and oranges in my pan set to see what I could/wanted to do for some of the other paintings later in this post.

After my Silver Chair binge last month, I listened to the audio book and Focus on the Family versions of The Horse and His Boy, and one of the effects of that marathon was the desire to draw the Hermit of the Southern March (or more specifically, his cloak, which Lewis describes as "the color of autumn leaves").

Here are some more face sketches.

And a vaguely serpentine person in a hood.

An Entish creature and a diamond snake.

Angular zoot suit guy.

More faces, some with descriptions.

Even more description faces.

This next piece is a practice painting for Samwise's first birthday coming up in a couple months. He has a lovie blanket with Nutbrown Hare from the kids' book Guess How Much I Love You, and since that's the thing he loves most (aside from his mom and our cat Pumpkin), we're going to theme his party around the book. (I used a page from one of the Guess How Much I Love You books as a model for the Nutbrown Hare here and in the later painting.)

The next three paintings are the three panels for the finalized version of the sign.