so today i'm going to be turning one of my sketchbook pages into something new.
this is the one that i started with, of the astronaut cat walking through some grasses
and disturbing little ghosties coming up, which quickly turned into this,
and then i did a digital version like this, in which i was playing with a narrow depth of field,
which creates that sort of bokeh effect where everything in the background and the foreground is
blurred out. i wanted to see if i could replicate something like that with watercolor. to me,
the simplest way to start was to wet everything that i didn't necessarily need a crisp edge,
so everywhere around the cat, and then dropping in the colors that i wanted and just letting it
be blurred out from the start, how this image kind of transformed was inspired by a forest
walk we did recently, it's currently winter-ish, and so all of our plants are kind of barren,
but there's such an interesting beautiful color palette out there right now, where there's these
warm muted red colors, the yellow of the dead grass. along the ground, there are
these translucent red berries, and whatever plant they were growing from withers away,
and so it just seems like there's these two deep red jewels standing straight up on what looks like
a dead piece of grass. i don't know what they are and i couldn't find any pictures or video
where i could try to identify them. i have no idea what they are but they're very very pretty
and i'd really like to know what they are, so if you have any kind of idea, please let me know in
the comments! but since this is part of my wild satellite series in which a cat builds a satellite
and explores different worlds, i am using familiar things from our world but i kind of like combining
them or abstracting them in such a way to make it seem more magical. i wanted it to look like he was
stepping through grass that has either rubies or just some kind of precious jewel growing in them,
and as he walks, he's going to be alerting and scattering all the little ghosties that are hiding
in it. so i was trying a few different things because i didn't really know how to approach it.
to me it seemed like just having parts of the painting that were still blurry,
really, to me, just felt like not finishing them,
and so i started in that area with the intention of leaving it in the initial
sort of coloring vague outline stages. at first i was trying to just do negative painting around
implied grass strands and then using my other hand to blur the edge that i was painting,
and then eventually i realized it's actually a little bit better to just do wet on wet the
whole time, and do more dramatic changes in color tone and darkness and stuff like that.
the trickiest part of this painting was knowing that the middle part was going to be detailed
and then both the top and the bottom was going to be blurry, and i wasn't sure how
it's going to make the transition look like a narrow depth of field photograph effect
rather than just strip of painting that's finished and then strip of painting that was unfinished.
but the way that i approached it is i just did the strip in the middle that was mostly finished,
and then make the transition my future self's problem. i tried to make sure my colors fade out
gradually and not having a distinctive line there. for the background transition, i kept all of the
gems up there somewhat blurry and undefined, and then my transition was to paint these little vague
silhouettes of grass with a slightly darker color, because then i was able to keep going,
but fading them out in color making them cooler but also paler so it looks like they were just
disappearing into the background. transitioning the foreground was much harder. i did at first
try to do little white paint strands to add in grass, because it seemed to me
that he was on the very edge of a bald patch where there wasn't anything really between that in terms
of grass height. then i took a look at a couple of different photographs of blurred grass. there
is a solid little valley shape where you can see some of the detailed grass through it, and so once
i started cutting into this section with little v's where there was just slightly more detail,
i think that made it just a little bit more interesting, more convincing. and so after that,
it was just a matter of adding my little ghosties. so let me know what you guys think. do you think
that this this works? do you think it actually kind of looks like a narrow depth of field effect
in a photograph? is there anything that you would have done differently? i think it turned
out pretty cool. thanks for watching guys. like if you liked and i'll see you next time.