Frog Painting

When I was a kid, we had a pet frog, and I’ve always loved them. And I’m not alone in that. Frogs are huge in pop culture and we all love the weird little guys haha So when I wanted to work on a new painting, this frog photo on Pixabay.com stuck out to me as a great reference. You can find the reference photo for yourself here

I worked on this in Procreate on the iPad using my digital gouache set. Fun fact about this painting is that it is the first time I haven’t traced any part of my painting. (To be clear, I usually trace my sketch to get general shapes, and then paint from there, but in this painting it is all freehand.) I also chose this reference for my painting because it is very clear and high contrast with hard edges.

As for the actual painting process, I let myself run free more than I have in the past. As mentioned, this was fully freehand, so edges and color blending was fairly loose. I liked how the gouache brushes worked and gave an easy textured look to the piece. It isn’t photorealistic, but it is very clean and real, which was a departure from my more cartoon inspired roots. It ended up taking about an hour and forty minutes of drawing time, and for the stats nerds, it used 3,071 brush strokes.

So I hope you enjoy this painting, and this behind the scenes look about it. If you and interested in purchasing a copy for yourself you can through this link.

You’ll see as I went about painting this frog that it started out as just a square shaped canvas and I was just having fun. This is especially clear because I didn’t really follow much of a method, I just did what I felt like working on in the moment. I did eventually make it 8 by 10 inches because that’s what I prefer my paintings to be in because basic frames match that sizing. But overall, just enjoy the timelapse of this froggy.