Watercolours!

So I was back home at my parents house last weekend. Theyre out traveling for a week, so I had the place all for myself. Sad thing was, it rained, so I really had nothing at all to do that day. Woke up at about 2, after having watched movies all night after that sweet victory against the belarussians in the IIHF. Ate macaroni and omelettes (?), got dressed at about 8 in the evening. We all have those days.

Anyway, so I felt kind of ashamed I had not used those neat watercolour-pencils at all since I got them, which is a few years back now. So I decided to give them another go. After rummaging through about every cabinet in the house, I finally found a single brush. Woop woop.

Yes, this means you are, at last, getting a piece of traditional, non-digital art. Not a walkthrough like my other paintings, per se, but ill try to comment on what I did.

Heres what happened

First step was obviously sketching it out with a rough graphite pen, and after that is was all pretty straightforward. Filling out the areas with their respective colours and hues, I used about 5 or 6 different pens/colours. Then i used a fine pen with lots of water to liquify the powdery paint, and then its all a game of manipulating the different densities of colour around, until you get the right look. This can be quite tricky, as the water dries up rather quickly, depending on what kind of paper you use.

What you really should focus on here is nailing the different kinds of edges. There are mainly 2 kinds of edges you need to think about. Soft ones, kind of gradient-ish ones, and hard ones. This is rather obvious, is it not, but nailing the use of soft and hard edges will define the subject. Soft edge on the back of the character to make him fade into the envoirement, but bring him out with the hard edge on the other side.

Many a great artist has said, that the key to being a good painter, is the ability of being able to use soft and hard edges to bring out and level out areas of the painting in order to bring definition and contrast to them, exactly where and how you want it. Just like we do with colours, using saturation, lightness, values etc., which Ive already touched on in an earlier entry (Should be easy enough to find without me linking to it, after all, there arent that many entries to be found.) , we can use edges to create the very same effect. I hope to further demonstrate this in some other post, this painting wasnt exactly created with that in mind.

After I had sorted all that out, I found some old markers. They were all different shades of grey, but i figured thats only because the ink or whatever in them have been mixed out with different amounts of water, not because they actually give out a grey colour, which is disappointing. Anyway, I used these markers to further accentuate the contrasts between light and dark. The edges of the gown-thing, for example, have been sharpened with the markers. Another, quite amusing, thing was that I found that the brightest shaded marker could also be used to water out and mix the watercolour, just like a regular brush, which i found quite interesting, and handy.


Anyway, there we go. I found this amazingly addictive space rocket simulator, named Kerbal Space Program, or something like that, which Ive decided to spend the rest of my evening with. At long last, some time to relax from an agonizingly stressful weekend.