Splashing Through Life - Art by Patricia Henderson

Today I started to block in the colours in the underpainting. As you can see it looks really rough, but it will all be covered in paper eventually. The paint acts as a guide for me and also to test colours and values.

I discovered a great art contest the other day called  Eco Arts Awards . I thought it would be a great contest to enter. Artists will submit artwork with their interpretation  of the meaning of Ecology.  The first thing that sprang to mind was Wetlands. I love Great Blue Herons, so I thought I'd make one the main focus, and also in keeping with the ecology theme, I'll be using my paper collage process, using primarily papers recycled from old books and magazines if I can. I found my heron reference from  Paint My Photo  a great website where photographers can post their photos for artists to use as copyright free reference material. Thanks Tracee Murphy for the great photo! After doing a couple of thumbnail sketches, I drew my scene onto a 24 X 12" canvas. Since this piece will be fairly complicated I will loosely paint it first with acrylics to give me a guideline while applying the papers. Here is my drawing so far. I will be fixing that poor dragon...