When to paint with watercolours?

For my feather paintings I would never choose anything other than watercolours. They are easy to blend to depict iridescence, precise enough for details of pattern and a wet into wet technique is ideally suited to showing the soft, fluffy afterfeather.

Most of my sketches involve watercolour, mostly because the paints are so much more portable than acrylics. Certainly when I went on sketching trips to the Falkland Islands and Egypt, watercolours were perfect for painting the wildlife and images that I saw there.

Watercolours are also versatile and are suitable for many different styles of wildlife art. Even though they often give a soft, translucent effect, they can equally well depict a hard surface such as stone. The Dancing Cranes painting from my Egyptian collection is pure watercolour and shows the sharp outlines of a relief carving in stone.

Sometimes when I'm creating wildlife artwork I sketch directly in watercolour without using pencil first, but frequently I use watercolours to enhance the original pencil sketches. Whatever your preferred method of working, watercolours are an essential part of a wildlife artist's toolkit.