Animals

This is from a sketch I did on my IPad whilst visiting my friend Kate who has at least five peacocks. They were roaming around, flying onto the window sill and generally being noisy and lively.

I put a lot of water onto watercolour paper , with a long bristle brush, then started sketching with a watercolour pencil. I added marker pens to it, inks and more pencil.

What I wanted was the angle of the peacock looking into the window, balancing on his claws and staring at the reflection of himself. Apparently they are extremely stupid, all show and no brain. The obvious thing was to draw while he had his feathers up in full display but I wanted to get the extraordinary shape of the body and just give an impression of the show of colour.

I will work on this to get more detail but this is the start.

I was amused to see how incredible they are from the front when they are posing for their mate but from the behind, they look ridiculous. I wanted to capture the arrogance and posturing while trying to indicate how dim he was.

The chest thrust out was highlighted by the dark shadow agains the lighter part of the window as was the right side of his tail highlighted by using complimentary colours. Against the lemony green I used purplish watercolour pencil.