Human's adapt as do styles adapt. The doodleism style started years ago, I had always made drawings in notebooks and it felt like they were stuck there where nobody could see them. When I found out that my lab books from graduate school were not allowed to leave the lab, it gave me the idea to transform the drawings into larger works of art. The challenge was to make the small doodles into something that was greater than the sum of its parts. This painting shows many of the features that have become typical of the style, a broken horizon, a distant sunset, random foliage, flowing water. The water was a main feature of the work, the river on the right has many creepy crawly things underneath, the lake on the left is meant to be calm and reflective.
Depicting objects underwater is tricky in any media, including watercolour. I started with the outlines of the underwater creatures, making the outlines squiggly and not complete was key in creating the illusion that their shapes are being bent by the rippling water. Then I overlayed the reflections in the rippling river using wet-in-wet techniques. Finally I put on the colours of the creatures, and some light shadowing to indicate that they are sitting on the bottom of a riverbed.
22x30" cold press, watercolour, 2015
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