echidna Illustration In Watercolour – available
(Original Artwork Available)
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A challenging but wonderful painting subject, the latest Aussie Critter to join the crew is the Echidna. She is such a sweetie, lost in her own little world of wonder and wander, shes a unique, essential and a perfect addition to this animal illustration series. Weve had a lot of fun, dreaming up her character, playing around with posture, pose and her story as we refine our ideas to a final layout.
From there I began the drawing, a fairly minimal guide this time because of her complexity. Most of the detail will rely on my brushwork in the rendering process. Im focussed on the wonderful flow and accurate structure of my echidna in this early stage, capturing both accuracy and character to build on.
As youve seen now, the styling of this series is already well established, with the wombat illustration the Quokka illustration the platypus illustration and the Magpie Illustration before it paving the way forwards clearly now. Although each has its own flavour and distinction, its important that there is a strong alignment to the collection overall.
My echidna illustration is all about keeping that wonderful balance of colour throughout the group, whilst creating a beautiful point of difference with the use of texture in this painting. Wetting up the brushes, I start with the gorgeous underbelly, creating rich and wonderful colours, a soft and spiky belly all at once, creating a fantastic upswing to her pose, and developing a gentle, sweet expression and gaze on her face in this complex section. I love her already!
Spine by spine, her prickly back comes together, carrying the beautiful belly colours through to the quills now. Its tricky tricky work, particularly in watercolour, but a little focus and time… and many years of experience behind me… saw her come to completion in due course, and she is such a delightful character.
Placing a little pink butterfly above the tip of her nose was just the punctuation she needed, bringing a fantastic and versatile additional element to the table for my client. On our echidna illustration, my client and I both agree… we just love her!
Of course, in the design stage, she can be placed with any of the other animals perfectly well to create completely new stories. The butterfly can also be placed in any number of ways too, once again, giving my client as much scope to diversify as possible. Finally, to the echidna painting I also illustrated a collection of other fun and colourful elements that will be incorporated in the same way, so Ill be looking out for my echidna to hit the shelves soon enough in a variety of variations… all such fun and fabulous in their own varied ways.
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*(Apologies for the logo on these images. Unfortunately my work is stolen so often it has become essential to mark and minimise the images here as much as i can)