The wonderful variety of animal and birdlife means that you will never be short of inspiration.

This course is based on Liz's successful in person watercolour workshop, and explores the painting of subjects from pets to farm animals, from British wildlife to more exotic creatures. We will spend time looking at eyes, tone and texture to create convincing animal portraits brimming with life and energy.

The final project, which is a gorgeous donkey, is filmed in real time, so that you can paint along if you wish to, or watch and paint in your own way.

My second book 'Painting Animals in Watercolour' was published by The Crowood Press in 2021.

If you have enjoyed this course and share the work you've done on it, please make sure to tag me on social media (@lizchaderton on Instagram and /lizchadertonartist on Facebook) so I can get to see it too! It would be great if you could say that it is from this course, as that helps spread the word.

If you are not a member already, why not join Watercolour Studio over on Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/groups/694706731930461 And finally, you should not exhibit or display pieces completed on this course without my written permission, to comply with copyright law. I really look forward to seeing what you do. 

Liz takes you through a series of warm ups covering the folllowing topics:

Even if you are an experienced watercolourist, it is worth checking that we are using the same terms.

Tone does all the work and colour gets all the glory.

Tone - the light and dark - describes the form and volume of any subject. Colour or hue, brings an emotion to it. As long as we get the tones right, we can substitute the colour and everything will still 'work'. This is called colour-value switching.

Liz explains how we alter the tone of a colour in watercolour and takes you through an exercise to train your eye in colour-value switching.

A brush is only one way of placing and moving pigment on the surface. In this module we will explore just a few possibilities of achieving interesting illusions of texture and we will start to think about how they can be applied in our paintings of animals. If you enjoyed this section, there must be 40 more possibilities! Liz plans to do a whole course on pigment placing in the near future.

The ability to observe our subject and get to the core of it, is explored in this module. We will use a simple feather, but it will teach us so much. In the process we will practice 'growing a wash' in a controlled yet exciting way. We will also use hard and soft edges to create interest.

The human eye recognises shapes and patterns from birth. By training ourselves to consider shapes and not things (what the object actually is), we will improve our painting immeasurably. Using a silhouette of your chosing we will paint a simple piece and unleash the power of shape.

Why the success of the eyes dictates the success of the painting.

The features of each animal are very distinctive. Though we can't cover every possibility, in this short module we look at some strategies to capture certain features. Using specific shaped brushes, creating a path of water, manipulating the dampness of the surface - these all help us create further interest in our paintings.

Time to pull all our learning together in this painting of a beautiful donkey. From considering why we want to paint it in the first place, to how we can communicate to our viewer, this full length demonstration takes you through every aspect of the process.