I started out like I suppose everybody did, with research drawings of different animals: Dogs, birds, a caterpillar, many sketches of our cat at home \u00a0\u2026 searching for the one sketch, one animal than would feel just right for the exercise. \u00a0And then there was this picture of a pelican in one of my photo books, and suddenly, I remembered how I\u2019d spent many hours in the zoo one summer with my sketching book, watching and drawing these big birds walking around and swimming. And now looking at the photo all of a sudden I wondered how hard it must be for a young pelican to learn how to coordinate this big beak and these wings and feet \u2013 and how funny it must be to watch him learning just that! With this in mind I started to draw.<\/p>\n
I made sketches of the pelican doing different moves like lifting one leg (in that special way birds do, you know), spreading his wings, and so on. Soon it looked like the bird was sort of dancing around on my paper. A story seemed to want to tell itself in these sketches, \u00a0about a young pelican who wants to become a dancer, with nobody backing him up but his friend, a little crab. But though I liked that story (and the crab), while my pelican on the paper fell over his feet again and again I felt what he really<\/em> wanted to do was to fly. After all, that\u2019s what becoming an adult bird is really all about, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n So finally, \u00a0for the coloured picture I chose the moment when the young pelican is able to take off for the first time \u2013 of course together with his friend the crab!<\/p>\n Concerning the technique, I didn\u2019t think too long about that. Watercolours it would be! I\u2019ve been using watercolours for many years now and I\u2019m really sort of into them. Which is strange, because at first I didn\u2019t like them at all, not to say I really hated them. When I was younger, I was rather one for drawings because I felt like I couldn\u2019t control these running, floating colours at all. But whenever I took a closer look at pictures of artists I liked I realised: They were created with watercolours! I wanted to catch this magic I found in their works in my pictures as well. So after a lot of hesitation, I took the brush instead of a pencil and since then have kept on going. And now I really can\u2019t imagine to live without these beautiful colours. (But of course I didn\u2019t give up drawing completely.)<\/p>\n But although I\u2019m quite set on the medium, I\u2019m still experimentating \u00a0with finding \u2018my own\u2019 way of painting. And, to get back to the pelican, because I knew this would be a picture with not too many coloured details and background, I thought it was a good one to try out a type of colours I\u2019ve heard of but did not paint with before. These special colours (\u2018Aquacryl\u2019) can be used like watercolours but the difference is that the binding agent ist not gum arabic but modified acrylic instead. I was really interested to see which effects this would have on the picture, and because these colours are probably not too well known, I shall tell you a bit more about my experiences with them.<\/p>\n Before starting with the watercolours though I used coloured pencils for the contours of the bird\u00a0 \u2013 a bit nervously, especially with the orange, because it is such a \u2018decisive\u2019 colour. But I thought it might be a good way to make a \u00a0picture with a mainly white bird more vivid and also catch a bit of sunlight on the wings. Then, taking the new watercolours and moving on to doing the shadowed parts on the bird\u2019s body and the bright ones on the beak and legs I found out that the \u00a0\u2018Aquacryl\u2019 colours are very, very<\/em> bright if you use them without mixing them too much. Really brilliant colours! And one can also easily wash them out in lighter areas because they stay on the surface of the paper and do not sink in like others. On the other hand, because of this property of the colours it felt like I was almost \u2018pushing\u2019 them around at times. It took me some time to get used to this, but overall, I really liked the general effect. Maybe I got a bit carried away with my success at that time …<\/p>\n
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