Hello, Rhino!

Hello, Rhino! Watercolour on Canson paper (180 gr), size 9x10 cm.

I made this painting on the second day of my holiday, which was exactly two days ago. It was my intention to paint something related to something that I’ve been concerning about lately. At first, I was thinking about a painting that resembles a campaign to save the earth (for example, by planting some trees and prevent the animals from extinction), but when I looked into some electronic brochures and leaflets from WWF (which were able to be downloaded from their official website) in my archive, a picture of Rhinoceros from Sumatra island caught my eyes, as if it strucked my mind and wanted to be painted in just a second (Oh, I’m telling you the truth about a feeling of a painter who sees something that was so interesting). Suddenly, I remembered a ‘SAVE THE RHINO’ campaign by WWF (Rhinocare) and somehow it inspired me to paint something related to it. I wasn’t so friendly with abstract paintings which have a lot of strokes and lines, so I decided to paint something definite. This kind of painting was actually a breaktrough for me because I’d never paint something so real before. Most of my old works were inspired by my own free mind, which weren’t pointing a thing, surreal-like. So, after I drew the rough illustration with my HB pencil (based on a photo of Sumatran Rhino on the leaflet), I painted the rhino’s main head first with a mix of black and white colour (with lots of water, of course). I left both of its ears, eye, and its only horn (you REALLY didn’t expect a rhino with two horns, right?) to be coloured later. Done with layering by using wet on dry technique (I wasn’t so fond of painting wet on wet and I couldn’t paint dry on dry because I was using watercolour pads, not tubes), I decided to paint the negative spaces with bright yellow. I added some vignette-like effects on the edges of the paper by applying darker yellow (more like orange, actually), then I paid my attention to the rhino’s eyes, horn, and ears. (you can see that I was playing with both dark and pale grey a lot, then adding some black colour to resemble the rhino’s actual skin pattern) You know, watercolouring is all about patience. Your paint would be so messed up if you applied new layer of colour without getting the base dried first. I had about 5 minutes to have mine dried before I added some details. If you had a sharp eyes, you’d notice that I added some redish brown to the rhino’s eyelid, the inner side of the ears and horn, and some white highlights to some edges of each of the head’s parts. Finally, it’s done! :) P.S : I’m currently selling this painting of mine. If you’re interested in buying it, please contact me via email. I’m also accepting questions related to this painting and other else. Thanks! :)