Watercolor freeing the Pooh demo. Tribute to Ernest shepherd.

Thank you for coming to this blog post. I have so much fun painting this Pooh painting. Illustration is fun. For some reasons I have always been fascinated by children illustrations. But Ernest Shepherd to me really is an awesome awesome artist. Sometimes I felt sad that gone is the day when our children couldn’t actually played around a neighborhood, in the wooded area no less, and be absolutely safe to a great extend. As I always said, when I was young, I was an explorer, I used to go wander off to very distance places to see what it is out there at a very very young age. With the birth of my little sister I was even more so, even wandered into cemetery and well, I was not smart enough to know if that was a safe place. The only time that a disaster almost happened to me was when my mom sent me off as a 4 years old in the night to go fetch my father at the factory. Life is quite fun when a child can actually have a hundred acre wood to play with his friends, and a few trees where his friends reside. I did not recall reading much about the growing up of Ernest Shepherd, if that was his childhood but I certainly loved the books. As I mentioned in the video, I had the fortune of running into the little red book of how he constructed some of the illustrations. And I made so much mistakes and I learned so much by following him. It is totally a great thing to make mistakes, the more mistakes we made, the more we can improved. The problem occured when we not willing to correct ourselves. Since I didn’t have a teacher, I was very careful a lot of the time to try to see carefully to correct myself. Since his work of winnie the pooh copyright expired, I can actually do this little illustration to share with you to pay tribute to a very great artist. Just love all of his works.

And now my children had grown up, and sufficiently soaked in the imagination of the hundred acre wood, they are sharing them with their family. And Rachel my youngest daughter is sharing with her little Violet. And Violet absolutely loved freeing of pooh from rabbit’s hole. So my daughter kept encouraging me to finish the painting for her, as you can see in the beginning part of the video. I really hope I did this justice, but it is constrained by the nervousness of filming and drawing in front of you. Let me know if you enjoyed painting along or watching this.

Ok the colors used. Pooh is yellow ochre and quin Gold, lots of burnt umber and black for the area around the hole. Christopher robin’s hair is cadm yellow light and some quin gold, brown reddish color for the pants, flesh color is a bit of pink plus burnt sienna, Eyor is light wash of black. And the surrounding is my green mix of prylene green, indigo, sap green cadm yellow light. I put some indigo under their feets to accentuate the shadow and the force putting onto the ground.

I just got back from yellowstone national park with Violet and the gang. We had so much fun but I got so many mosquitoes bite. Oh well part of the fun of camping. And soon I am now working on a painting of butterflies. I am really excited about it. So stay tuned and meanwhile have fun painting and enjoying your summer.