The Click: Ayesha Ashraf

In the past few months, I helped organize the Annual Earth Day 2019 Teen Wildlife Art Show at Don Edward’s Education Center in Alviso. This is a program Vrinda Suresh, an Alsion alumnus, established in 2017, and I had participated in. The 2019 show is up now, displaying the artwork of 10 teenage artists from around the Bay Area. The work I contributed this year is a series of watercolor paintings focused around the 2019 Earth Day theme, “Protecting Species,” for the most part striving for realism to capture California’s native species, but problem solving by taking advantage of unique effects you can achieve with watercolor.

This is a monarch butterfly that I spent several hours on trying to make as realistic as possible, utilizing ink and white gel on my watercolors.

In this painting, I used the unique and translucent properties of watercolor to rather simply capture the complex layering of geese feathers, as well as the bird’s picturesque reflection in the water.

This is one of the paintings I spent the longest on: it’s of a California scrub jay. This was one of the first watercolor paintings that I did last summer, fascinated by Japanese watercolors I had recently acquired.

This is a great egret I tried to make pop out by painting a very dreary monotone background.

One of my more abstract painting, this is a harbor seal I painted, really experimenting with my paint by layering different colors both on the seal and the wave-like splatters emerging from behind where I even used foaming hand soap.

By now you can probably tell I really enjoy painting birds. This is a pelican I did fairly quickly.  I also created an ocean-like background using a lot of splattering.