Skip to main content

Fundamentals

I've decided to take a step back and practice the fundamentals of watercolor. I jumped into this daily project hoping to learn by doing: stepping out of my comfort zone, experimenting, sitting down, and doing the work. I've never had any formal training in this medium: just youtube videos and a few books. It's surprising to see just how far that little bit of knowledge and passion has taken me.

So today is all about focused practice with color and value. I have been following step by step instructions from Watercolor Essentials. The mountains in the above photo were my first attempts. They are pretty sloppy and uneven, but I learned a lot from them. Most notably: it is much easier to lighten watercolor than to darken it. Back to work!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice Skating Characters

 
Post a Comment
Read more

A Competent Profile

As I start to become more familiar with proportions and measurements for the various faces I attempt to draw, I am starting to wonder how to make a more complete portrait with my limited time. Do I stick to lines? Do I bring a brush and some ink? Which lines should I include? Which shapes are important to represent? Maybe this is a good time to look at the work other artists have done and try to work out some of their methods.
Post a Comment
Read more

Inktober Day 3 - "Bait"

Old school pen and ink. I haven't used a crow quill pen since high school - and, even then, I remember struggling to get it to work. This time, I thought I would try to create something using only cross-hatching. The prompt word today is "bait". This word took me into a lot of different ideas, but the one I ultimately landed on is based on the will-o-wisp. In my head, I imagined glowing orbs in front of a copse of swamp trees all created with layers of cross-hatching. Things had to be scaled back a bit. There are still two trees in the background if you look hard enough. Success? Sort of. It forced me to use a different kind of pen and, in doing so, made me want to keep going and get better with it.
Post a Comment
Read more