This painting is based on its smaller predecessor, Rainbow Giraffe the First, my comfort zone and happy place. I used my previous painting as a reference to create this. I felt totally out of my comfort zone. My first really large watercolour on paper. The familiarity of something I’d already painted seemed like a safe place to start. I imported a ten-meter roll of beautiful cold-pressed watercolour paper from overseas, spread it across the dining room table and cut it to size. Everything, when working on a large scale, takes an enormous amount of time and effort, even something as simple as cutting paper. The next step was to mount the paper on a frame I’d built and secure it to the backing board to keep the wood’s acidity at bay. I figured it was safer to put blank paper on a board for the first time and then paint it, rather than the other way around. Just in case it flopped. Failure is not usually something that plagues my mind when I paint, but all the firsts here had me a little unhinged. Rainbow Giraffe the Second ended up working out just fine.