Watercolor Splotch Animal Doodle Tutorial

How to Make Watercolor Splotch Doodle Art

Learning to create art is a lot of fun, if you do it right. Making watercolor splotch animal doodles is one of the ways to enjoy the process of learning to draw. This started as a way to clean my watercolor palette. I’ve been using this same palette for years and it’s a little messy, as I’m sure is the case with most artists’ palettes.

This is a great way to work on being more creative and thinking outside the box. And it’s also a fun way to come up with some new ideas for animal doodles.

You can use your messy palette to make your watercolor splotches, or you can use fresh paint. Either way will work just fine. Let’s gather up some art supplies and get started on this fun art activity.

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Art Supplies

Watercolor paint (mine are Van Gogh)
Paint brush or Aqua brush
Paint palette
Paper
Cup of water
Paper towel or napkin
Fine liner pen

Watercolor Splotches

The first thing you need to do with this technique is to fill your paper with random, or semi-random, watercolor splotches. I used the paint from the messy areas of my watercolor palette since the purpose of doing this exercise to begin with was to clean up my palette.

One of the goals I set for myself this year is to start using some of the art supplies I have accumulated that just sit around taking up space. I have failed miserably since I just keep buying more art supplies, but it’s still my goal nonetheless. Because of this goal, I used some regular printer paper that I have an entire box of. You really could use any paper you have laying around.

There are a couple of different ways you can make your splotches. You can make them completely random and decide what they should be later. Or, you can make your watercolor splotches with some type of critter in mind. I did a little of each when I made mine. When making my splotches, I also tried to vary the colors a little bit just to make them more interesting.

Drawing Animal Doodles

After your watercolor splotches have completely dried, you can use an outlining pen to draw in your critters. The amount of dry time required will vary depending on your paper and how damp your splotches are. If your watercolors aren’t completely dry, your pen will smear, so make sure there is no moisture left in them. I let mine dry for most of the day.

As I was painting this first splotch, I started to see some sort of ogre looking creature. I went with that and added another horn shape on the other side to balance it out. The second shape reminded me of a turtle. I added a little bit of color for a tail.

For my lines I used a black Sharpie pen with a medium nib. I’ve been using these pens for quite awhile now and I use them for most of my work that requires black pen. The type of pen is entirely up to you and probably won’t make much of a difference in this exercise.

So you can see here how I turned my splotches into some type of critter. I’m not very good at drawing from my imagination, so for some of the splotches I looked up some reference images to use as a loose idea for my drawing. When doing this I tried to take a quick glance at my reference and then complete my drawing without looking a second time. I wanted to keep my drawings very relaxed.

When drawing out my animal doodles, I wasn’t worried about where my lines fell on the watercolor splotches. The splotches were only used to come up with an idea of what my critter would be.

Watercolor Splotch Animal Doodles Examples

Here is what my completed page looks like. As you can see I’ve drawn out a variety of different types of critters. I just let the splotch guide me into my drawing. When doing my drawings, I jumped around and worked on the ones that were more obvious too me first. Also, I didn’t worry at all about the style of the drawings.

Animal Doodle Quick Sketch Exercise

If drawing animal doodles on your watercolor splotches feels too overwhelming, you can try doing some quick sketching to warm up before working on your drawings. To do this, just set a timer for three or five minutes and quickly sketch out some animal doodles until you run out of time.

You could also just do some quick sketching until you fill your paper. The benefit to doing this type of exercise is to loosen up a little bit and get your creative juices flowing. You don’t need to worry about getting too detailed with your sketches. Just get yourself familiar with the different characteristics of various animals.

This is a great warm up exercise as well. Draw loosely and relaxed to get yourself warmed up.