This painting is an attempt in watercolor realism. Watercolor realism is my new found passion. I am learning a lot of techniques. There are many artists who have displayed or shared their techniques to achieve realism in watercolor. I admire these artists. I will write a blog sometime on the artists and works I refer to while working on my paintings. In the meantime a little search on YouTube can give immense results.
It needs immense patience and experience to achieve realism in watercolour. Although the basics of watercolour techniques remain the same, some techniques are used in realism to achieve textures differ from artist to artist. The best part about watercolour realism is the challenge it throws with this unpredictable medium.
As mentioned, this is my new found love or passion, I started learning this medium very closely. Well, watercolour is known for its flowy and transparent nature, while realism is not flowy. As it has details it brings in a tightness or stillness in the painting. I am still exploring this style and I aim to achieve dynamism in realistic paintings. This is a new journey and it needs hard work. Of course, there is another thing that I learned while studying watercolour realism. I understood that different subjects suit different styles. Well, this is purely my understanding. I am sure experts may have their own thoughts. Like a lovely landscape with expanse water and boats at a distance can look very nice in a loose style of watercolour. Similarly, a wildlife image of a beautiful animal can look excellent in realism. Of course, many achieve amazing results of painting animals with loose technique of watercolours also. So I guess it depends on artists.
Okay, coming back to this painting. I loved this image of the cow and the calf sourced from Pinterest. There were two things that attracted me to this picture and made me paint it. One - I was attracted to the eyes of both mother cow and the calf. While the calf looks alert looking at the photographer, the mother cow looks engrossed in petting her calf. Two was the emotion of motherhood. I am a mother now and I know how it feels to be with your child. It is like a blessed moment. So I decided to paint it.
With more white spaces in the painting the work on it was much less. However, to show the white colour of the cow, I used purple for the shadows and values. Meanwhile for the background I chose some earthly colours to give a feel of rural India. The horn of the mother cow needed some shades of dark brown. I would like to do another painting on this subject. Maybe a close up. However, that's in my wish list.
Some more information - Cows in India are worshipped and are respectfully called "gowmata" which means Mother cow. So cows are compared to mother as they provide dairy products which provide nutrition to the family. Also cattle is considered as "gowdhan" which means cattle property. So as Indians we are mostly conditioned to respect the cow as worship it.
Hope you all like this painting. I would love to know more thoughts on these.
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