Ep. 21, Page 52

smbhax on Feb. 14, 2014

I don't remember in exactly what order the realization came, but it struck me today that I was trying to use watercolors like ink or paint rather than watercolor: I was slapping down the color I wanted to be in a spot, thinking I had to get it right on the first try, and ending up with oversaturated pigment gathering into unsightly lumps (exacerbated by my trying to make everything darker in Photoshop), rather than using the runniness (which apparently is not a word) and transparency of watercolors to build an image up out of layers of thin, semi-abstract glazes. Confirmation for the validity of this approach came from Bill Sienkiewicz's recent piece, "Kelby,“ which is pretty darn neat if you ask me.
So then I went on YouTube looking for helpful instructional videos on watercolor. Searching for ”watercolor," there are of course a ton; skipping somewhat randomly down the list, I found this one, this one, and this one pretty useful. Now I want a nice square brush. I've started doing watercolor on my angled drawing table rather than on a flat work table, to take advantage of gravity to direct pigment spread, and to prevent pooling. And I should probably get some titanium white, might work better in some cases than the waterproof white ink I've been using.
And I had to use more than I would have liked of that today because the pencils for today's page had the typical male caveman artist dislocated spine problem. Urgh.
With the watercolor I made some pretty big mistakes right off the bat, and lost the face later, but I could see some things working. Progress will be made.