So doing a mushroom study has paid off in the end and is a good way to practise on a small scale before adding them to larger paintings.

Here you can see smaller complete fungi and the large one just has an undercoat started.

Fungi all finished apart from the final shadows from the frog that will be added after I complete Freddy.

As with the other frog painting I just added a representation of a log for it to sit on.

This little frog had a different light source than the last one so it wasn’t going to be as bright.

I absolutely love painting frogs, even though they are very time consuming with all the tiny dots and multiple layers. This adds to the realism and is a similar style to painting the shells of red claws or yabbies.

Which reminds me I photographed a blue claw yabbie the other day so expect a painting of this in the future.

This different pose of the frog shows the pink colours of its back legs, which are a similar match the fungi.

Comparing the frogs eyes to my other painting this one had more reflections and bits of blue. I later changed the left one to have less reflections and think it looks better for it.

More of the frogs side was showing and this was full of little bumps which was a challenge to paint. Starting with small dabs of dark green paint then I gradually pain smaller and lighter circles and then finish off with a white highlight.

I made sure that some of the frogs toes were resting on the fungi to make it look more natural and this enabled me to place a few shadows on the fungi.

90% of the frog was painted using this little paint brush to get all the fine detail. Thats why each one takes around 4 – 5 days to paint.

So what do you think, do you like the addition of mushrooms to the painting ?

Would you like to see me paint more little frogs ?