The second illustration of 2023 calendar: February. I originally wanted the horses to have a bit different kind of color, but my attempt to produce the pattern I desired failed and I needed to go with plan B instead. That's the thing about watercolors; once you make a mistake you need to figure out a way to make it work for you so nobody's going to notice there's a mistake. When it comes to other ways of coloring, there's often a chance to erase your mistake or just paint another layer on top of it, but watercolors are quite unforgiving. Must be one of the reasons I like them so much. 😝
The good thing is, thanks to my failure, (I should've painted the horse on the left completely white first, and only later add the brows spots, not work with white and brown at the same time) I learned a valuable lesson and I'm sure it will be useful sometime in the future.
The horse on the right was also supposed to be differently colored, but I changed my mind about the color at the last minute. That one wasn't due to a mistake though. 😝 I simply didn't want the two horses to be too similarly colored.
Here's the "official" sketch that I traced on the watercolor paper using my dear light pad.
Here's the watercolor pencil lineart on watercolor paper. Before applying any color on it, I added masking fluid for the snowflakes.
As always, in the gallery above, there are photos of the painting process. Below is the finished, scanned illustration.