Beautiful Oops

The idea behind this painting is that there are two rabbits hopping through a field together. When I first got the paper with the ink splotches on it I rotated it to different angle to see what I could turn it into from each direction. At first I thought it could be an otter swimming up but then I flipped it the other way and saw that the longer ink spot resembled a rabbit. This connects to my life because I have a rabbit named Phoebe who I like to draw sometimes.

The first thing I did was sketch out the rabbits around the ink spots. I had to look at some pictures of rabbits mid-hop to make sure I got the poses right. Then I sketched out a background that was inspired by the simplified backgrounds that are in some children's books because that was the style I was going for. Then I used watercolors to color everything in. I started with light colors and then added the darker colors on top. I had already colored the rabbits with pencil so I just went over that with some gray watercolor. The last thing I did was add lines and detail using a thin black pen.

I added the tree on the right to balance the painting out because the rabbits are both on the left and it makes the background more interesting. Before I started the painting I painted the colors on another piece of paper so I could pick ones that went together more easily. This made the process a lot faster and helped create the lighter style that I wanted. I used different values of green in the grass and the tree to add some depth and make the grass look sort of patchy. I used the same darker green in the grass behind the rabbits as I did at the bottom of the page to create some unity in the colors. My project evolved as I changed up the elements of the background when I was drawing in pencil until it looked right. It also evolved when I was trying to figure out what the ink spots looked like to me and how to add on to that. My next step could be to practice more with simple nature backgrounds and do more things in this style because I really like how it turned out.