Watercolor's so HARD!

The most oft-repeated and least true thing that gets said about watercolor.

"Oh. You paint in watercolor?? Watercolor's so HARD!"

Always makes me scratch my head. It's this thing that people who've never even tried watercolor say. It's this thing that people who've tried watercolor say. And I think they repeat it because everybody else says it. But...harder than what? Acrylic? Oil? Pastel? A rock? Diamond drill bits?

It may have something to do with the fable that you can't correct anything in watercolor after it's dried. Not so. I'm here to show you how.

As an illustrator, you do a lot of stuff. You get asked to illustrate things about which you may know next to nothing. Before the Age of The Google, you were stuck with what reference in books and magazines that you could get your physical gloms on.  And it was in this Age of Innocence that I painted a big brown bat using echolocation, for a Bird Watcher's Digest booklet by Rob and Kim Mies titled, "Understanding Bats."

I did my best, and my best pretty much sucked. I didn't know anything about bats, and I kind of made up the face. Maybe there's a bat somewhere on the planet that looks like this, but it sure isn't a big brown. Some kind of weird African mastiff bat, maybe. And those teeth? From hunger.

So Bill asked if BWD could re-use this and a couple of other paintings for  a new, revised edition of the "Understanding Bats" booklet. Sure, I said, and miraculously, and after four passes through a 12-drawer oaken flatfile, I finally found the originals. 

And was aghast. I couldn't let THAT fugly face go to print, with all I've learned and all I've loved about bats between 1996 and now! I remember it was 1996 because I was pregnant with Phoebe when I painted it, and Rob and Kim (then of the Organization for Bat Conservation) let me watch them feed their bats in their camper trailer in the parking lot of BWD. And I was all uncharacteristically spooky about contact with the bats and being pregnant and disease and stuff. Being pregnant will do that to you. Fortunately it was a correctible condition.

As was the mastiff-like face of the bat. Eminently correctible, even 17 years later. What you do is

you dip your brush in clear water, pool it on the offending area, and scrub. 

You suck up the pigment and the bad juju in the brush, rinse and repeat. If the ear's bad, you scrub that out, too.

And then when it's all dry, you paint a big brown bat face what am a big brown bat face over the scrubby part. Better. Far from perfect, but not fugly.

And the whole thing looks a lot better for it.

Ryan Amos, Big Brown Bat. Note blunt-tipped tragus. If he were a little brown bat, it'd be pointed and narrower.

Speaking of bat faces, I've been doing some retro-research on the True Identity of Ryan Amos and Drusilla, the two purported big brown bats I took through this past winter. I finally knuckled down and consulted some field guides. Couldn't make hide nor hair of the differences using photos in the Kaufman Focus Guide, because they didn't show the tragus (the little process in the front of the ear); nor did they show the back feet of big brown or little brown bats.

So I consulted Fiona Reid's Peterson Field Guide to Mammals of North America, which uses her careful watercolor paintings. And then it was clear. Both my kids were big browns, with a wide, blunt (not pointed) tragus, and short hairs (not long hairs) on their hind toes. Yes, these are the distinctions we use to differentiate bats. It's subtle stuff, and I'm always questioning myself. Do I even know what I'm looking at?? They looked like big browns; they acted like big browns (feisty as all get out, and bitey too), but they were small (15 gm for Ryan, and 17 for Dru). And I wondered. Now I know.

Yahoo. Here's to watercolor painting, here's to paintings in field guides, and here's to the search for truth and somewhat improved beauty.

And making your mistakes into birds. Yeah, they're birds now.

Let's Paint Bats!

Last January, I got a commission for a painting of big brown bats. That doesn't happen very often, or, never. Who wants bats? I do, and maybe one or two other people I can think of. I was excited. Not least because it was for my friend Kristen from Wheeling and she is awesome. Her mother Debbie is, too. Knew that a Zick painting of bats would make Kristen's canary chirp. She also bought a copy of The Bluebird Effect. It was going to be a totally Zick birthday.

I knew Kris, being a naturalist, would like a sketchbook treatment, so I drew some bats in a bunch of poses, with details that grabbed me.

Little wing-tail membranes, where and how it all connects, things like that. When I have a bat I just want to unfold it and examine it. But they tend not to like that very much. They cuss something awful. 

There are tons of tiny crenulations and wrinkles in the membranes when they're folded. They expand enormously in flight and in use. Membranes, marvelous membranes.

But how to make the bats look as impossibly soft as they are? Water. 

First, I flooded the fur area with water.

Just carried it over on a brush and pumped it onto the drawing.

Then, I got the brush loaded with a thick strong dose of burnt sienna and a touch of quinacridone gold (I use Daniel Smith watercolors, fabulous and more affordable than others)  and touched that to the pool of water.

C'est voila. It spread with a feathery edge. Fur.

It's important to vary the colors within the area so it doesn't look boring or flat. Feed some blues into them. And it's very important to keep your brush tip well away from the edge of the water pool you created in the first step. You must let the paint make its own edge by diffusing into that pool. That's what makes it look furry. If you try to create a furry edge with your brush, it looks fake. Just feed the pigment in and let it spread where it will, out to the very edge of the water you laid down.

It's fun.

It's also fun to rinse your brush, dry it on a tissue, and then suck some of that color back out to make highlights. See the pale trace behind the brush tip? I'm dragging pigment back out.

It never looks quite as soft after it dries, but it looks pretty good.

 Here's another bat, dried.

 I painted these from photos I took of Dee Dee and Darryl, my starter bats. The first ones I took care of, and still living in my heart. Darryl's gone, but Dee Dee lives with a rehabilitator in northeast Ohio now.

The finished painting. Debbie and Kiki liked it! I love painting things for friends.