Watercolor Wednesday: Sun, Moon, and Fan Art

Welcome to another edition of Watercolor Wednesday! I've been doing a lot of painting in the last couple of weeks, thanks to some inspiring reads and some inspiring posts from friends. On to the art!

First up, there's a postcard of a beach scene that was primarily a chance to try getting the salt texture right. I finally realized with this one that I wasn't getting enough water on the page for the salt to properly absorb the water and paint and leave this lovely texture behind.

I call this piece "Freckles in the Sun" and I have to admit I loved playing with the spatter look. I used a lot of wet on dry with this one (something I've been advised I might do too much of) but I mixed in some wet on wet as well (which is where the softer colors of the hair, dress, and face come in). Aside from the "freckles", my favorite part of this painting is the way the facial details came through. I might come back to this character at some point.

This was one of my failed attempts with the salt texture. (In fact, I'm not sure you can even see the small spots of texture at all.) I did get a nice midnight blue mixed here though.

This painting is a fan art attempt at the painting from the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I'm fairly pleased with the way it turned out, but I think I'll try it again with more wet on wet technique.

Is it still fan art if the characters are your own? I liked the idea of seeing some of the Albion Apparent characters as playing cards, so here are Bryn, Mortimer, Merlin, and Robin in some basic playing card styles.

A moonlit beachscape postcard, I tried some more grassy texture here. I didn't do much with salt texture, but I did play with white splatter for stars again.

Possibly my favorite moon-themed piece of late, this is a Hunter's Moon in a cloudy night sky. I didn't go as dark with the background this time, and I think the moon would have come out better if I'd let the sky layer dry more completely before adding the moon. (The color was much more orange before I painted it, and it looks a little too brown now.) Even so, I'm happy with this one, and I got to play with salt texture and the effect of dropping water into drying paint a little.

This is a fan art piece of Pryrates, the red priest and secondary villain of Tad William's original Osten Ard trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I still suck at trying to get arms to look natural in perspective like this, but I like the effect of the eyes and nose being so densely painted compared to the paleness of the face.

There's another piece that I realize I failed to take a photograph of that features four sisters inspired by the fairy tale "The Snow Queen". I will probably not share that one just yet because I really, really want to redo it. The summer and autumn ladies turned out very well, but spring and winter were flawed at best and I foolishly attempted to add some definition and detail to the autumn queen with an ink pen and instead of helping the painting, it kind of . . . ruined it. So yeah. A repaint is definitely in order.

So that's what I've been up to with my art lately. Have you tried anything new with art recently? Share it in the comments. I'd love to see what you're doing!