How Not To ... Paint With Watercolour
Tuesday, 31 July 2007 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sigune*points at “not” in title*
You have been warned.
Also, this post contains spoilers for DH. The spoiler in the drawings is relative, if you ask me :-).
Feel free to skip all the tutorial stuff (which is image-heavy and, well, totally unprofessional) and sneak a peek at the pictures in my LJ gallery, here (pencils); here (inks); and here (watercolour).
I should really be doing other things, but I am still trying to cope with Deathly Hallows (*g*) and found that I needed to get a silly picture out of my system (in fact, more are popping up; I must squash them, aaaargh!!!). I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to work out, and I made scans and took pictures of the several stages, so I thought I might as well share them. Hence: a tutorial of sorts, though I’m not quite convinced that anyone stands anything to gain from my totally uninformed methods…
The picture is rated G (big surprise :P) and it’s a sort of joke. But it won’t work unless you know that the woman with the huge nose is my OFC, whose name is Brynhild.
The germ of the idea for this picture first came to me after seeing Wagner’s Walküre (a. k. a. The Valkyrie) performed at our local opera house last year. Though I had originally picked my OFC’s name purely for the alliteration with her surname of Bromley, I was rather delighted with her famous namesake, Brünnhilde, and I couldn’t resist picturing Brynhild on a flying horse, scouring the battlefield for Snape’s body (even then I was quite sure he’d snuff it) and carrying it to Walhalla – though I suspected Snape wouldn’t be particularly happy with the whole arrangement ;-).
Somehow, in the DH fallout, I suddenly found myself compelled to finally work the picture out. Simply drawing the image was a challenge already; the composition is, in my terms, unusually complex, not to mention that it had to contain a horse. A horse! These animals are so very difficult to draw – or at least they are to me. One of the problems I have is that I don’t want to copy another artist’s horse; another is that I very rarely find a photo that shows the exact pose I want. So I have to assemble and conjecture, which probably shows.
In any case – whatever is wrong with the horse (or the foreshortening, or whatever), please be kind and don’t point it out to me till next week, okay? There are bound to be mistakes, but I have worked so hard on it that I would like to be oblivious of them for a few days :P.
I do think I need an art beta, though. If there are any volunteers…
1. What I Used
a cheap A4-sized sketchbook
This is just for the preparatory drawing; doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
graphite pencils
I used several types, from soft (B5) to hard (H5). This is just because I gave the sketch more finish than usual; in the case of a preparatory drawing, one pencil will normally do :-).
tracing paper
a Staedtler Pigment Liner drawing pen, size 005
This is the smallest size there is; excellent for fine line-art. I rarely if ever use a broader pen when I plan to work with watercolours.
Cold Pressed (Not) French watercolour paper of a brand called Lana, 300 g/m2 (140 lbs)
This is the smoothest watercolour paper I have come across so far. I like it very much, because it is suitable for work with tracing paper (though you still lose some of the detail) and for detailed line-art, while nevertheless heavy enough to absorb a decent amount of water. Most watercolour artist prefer something with heavier grain, and sometimes I do too – it depends on what effect you want.
Koh-I-Noor Mondeluz watercolour pencils
These are very cheap, really. When I compare them to my Caran d’Ache watercolour pencils, I find that Caran d’Ache (e. g. Clancy) is much smoother and easier to use colour pencil-wise; they leave more solid lines too, whereas Koh-I-Noor pigment dissolves almost completely in water, mixes easily, and is generally more paint-like (e. g. January). I like both, and use each depending on what kind of effect I want.
Cotman watercolours
I have a small pocket box of those, which I bought in order to take my first steps in the world of watercolour. Cotman is the cheap version of Winsor & Newton; most books advise against buying cheap paints, but I just didn’t have the confidence to start with a professional set. Winsor & Newton is a very good brand; I think Cotman is decent enough too.
a fine marten hair brush (number 4)
This is an expensive brush for detailed work – the first thing they say you should buy when you start doing watercolour. I suppose you can survive without it, though, especially if you’re an amateur like me XD.
two Nova synthetic brushes (numbers 5 and 10) of a brand called Da Vinci
I like these very much. Usually, the problem with synthetic brushes is that they can’t hold a lot of water – petit gris is much better. Only, if you are going to be rubbing rather than painting (which is what I do when I use my Mondeluz pencils), synthetic brushes are better because sturdier. Now, Da Vinci’s Nova brushes are excellent in the way that they combine the sturdiness of synthetic hair with a capacity to hold a good quantity of water and to release it slowly. The number 10 is one of my favourite brushes.
2. Pencils
Mostly, when I want to paint something in watercolour, I make a fairly detailed sketch on drawing paper first. This serves several purposes. First of all, the sketch can be ‘belaboured’ at will, and if mistakes cannot be erased (paper is not always that forgiving), that doesn’t matter because they can be corrected during the transfer. Secondly, a design doesn’t always work out, and you don’t want to waste your watercolour paper like that. Third, I am plain bad at figuring out how much space my drawing will take up – I just start somewhere and see where I end up – and transferring allows me to place the image on the proper portion of the final page. On the pencils below you can see that the image is too far to the left; Snape’s cloak can’t pan out properly. I corrected that while transferring it onto watercolour paper by means of tracing paper.
This drawing is really much more elaborate and finished than is usual for something that is ultimately supposed to become a watercolour. That is because, although I had been thinking of colour from the first, I hesitated whether I would make the picture into a painting – it’s such an elaborate process (at least with me), and the subject is sort of silly, even though Snape looks rather tragic. I suppose that one thing that made me decide to continue is the fact that the design was, despite its crack quality, really rather ambitious for someone like me. It seemed worthwhile to take it a little further.
3. Inks
Mostly when I paint with watercolour, I transfer my drawing to the watercolour paper, then perfect the drawing using a hard and very sharp pencil, and finally paint the pencils. If the line-art doesn’t stand out sufficiently, I take my tiny Staedtler pen and lightly trace the linework, touching up. Here, however, I drew the whole design with the Staedtler pen, erased the pencils, and painted the inks. The only other time I have worked like this was when I drew November. I opted for it here because I wanted to keep the details and a certain fine quality of the lines.
Here I hesitated, because I thought the line-art was rather nice and sort of unusual for me in its thinness – usually I go for a bolder quality. I was a bit nervous about ruining it with the paint.
4. Watercolour Pencils
The pencil sketch is dark and grubby, on account of the paper quality as well as the fact that I had to make a lot of corrections – at a certain point some surfaces, like for example Brynhild’s hand, wouldn’t get white anymore despite furious erasing on my part :-). However, my idea of this image was that it should be very light and dainty, to reflect Brynhild’s frivolousness, the Valkyrie’s radiance, and the fact that I’m really poking fun at my own sadness about Snape’s fate. I didn’t want much, or strong, colour, which is why I opted for my Koh-I-Noor watercolour pencils.
If I’m honest, I am not very good at mixing colours with traditional watercolour pans, and I find that I rarely have the amount of control over the material that I want when making something. Opting for a pencil layer first was a sort of safety valve; I have never actually done it before. The Mondeluz pigment can easily be kept very light and transparent; I would give that a go first and then see whether I needed my stronger Cotman colours to add some relief.
As you can see, I added very little colour at all. I brushed the surface lightly with the pencils, determining which colours I was going to use and where (nr. 10 pink, nr. 3 pale and nr. 4 darker yellow, nr. 35 pale grey, nr. 18 sky blue, nr. 36 black, and skin tones of nr. 7 carmine + yellow – nr. 3 pale for Snape and nr. 4 dark for Brynhild). I also indicated where the highlights were going to be, and did some shading on the horse’s body. (When I took the photo, I had forgotten about Snape’s robe and feet…)
That done, I dissolved the pigment by applying water with my synthetic brushes. The result looked like this:
5. Watercolour Paint
The Koh-I-Noor-coloured picture was very, very pale; I needed a more solid black for Snape’s hair and robes, stronger shading for the horse’s body, and some darker nuances for Brynhild’s scarf. Because of the sober colour scheme I had chosen, I didn’t need to mix my paint; I could just use lamp black, Payne’s grey, Alizarin crimson and cobalt blue with varying amounts of water. I used my marten brush for details and my number 10 Da Vinci brush for larger surfaces. The black and grey took several coatings. I also added a grey wash to Snape’s face.
Though watercolour doesn’t allow you to make a lot of corrections, I find that it does let me play around a bit if I spot a mistake quickly and add more water. I’m also trying to get different effects by using wet-on-wet versus wet-on-dry, but I’m afraid that in general my skill is pretty limited, and most of the effects I get are by chance rather than purposefully done :D.
When the painting was dry, I scanned it. Scans of watercolour pictures never entirely look like the original in terms of colour, it seems, or at least not the way I make them; I always have some adjusting to do and it still won’t look the same. But if I can’t have an exact copy, I don’t mind settling for a better version ;P. I like to enhance the contrast a bit, and if all goes well, the image gets a kind of glow-like quality that the original doesn’t have.
And then the thing is ready for posting.
The Ride of the Valkyrie
I shouldn’t have been drawing and writing this when I still owe:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bethbethbeth a drawing;
redvelvetcanopy a drawing;
somebody at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dh_predictions a drabble/drawble/ficlet/whatever;
lots of people replies to their comments on my previous two posts;
and the world (;P) a heap of RL writing –
…But I couldn’t help it. Will change my wicked ways as best I can. Trying to catch up.
You have been warned.
Also, this post contains spoilers for DH. The spoiler in the drawings is relative, if you ask me :-).
Feel free to skip all the tutorial stuff (which is image-heavy and, well, totally unprofessional) and sneak a peek at the pictures in my LJ gallery, here (pencils); here (inks); and here (watercolour).
I should really be doing other things, but I am still trying to cope with Deathly Hallows (*g*) and found that I needed to get a silly picture out of my system (in fact, more are popping up; I must squash them, aaaargh!!!). I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to work out, and I made scans and took pictures of the several stages, so I thought I might as well share them. Hence: a tutorial of sorts, though I’m not quite convinced that anyone stands anything to gain from my totally uninformed methods…
The picture is rated G (big surprise :P) and it’s a sort of joke. But it won’t work unless you know that the woman with the huge nose is my OFC, whose name is Brynhild.
The germ of the idea for this picture first came to me after seeing Wagner’s Walküre (a. k. a. The Valkyrie) performed at our local opera house last year. Though I had originally picked my OFC’s name purely for the alliteration with her surname of Bromley, I was rather delighted with her famous namesake, Brünnhilde, and I couldn’t resist picturing Brynhild on a flying horse, scouring the battlefield for Snape’s body (even then I was quite sure he’d snuff it) and carrying it to Walhalla – though I suspected Snape wouldn’t be particularly happy with the whole arrangement ;-).
Somehow, in the DH fallout, I suddenly found myself compelled to finally work the picture out. Simply drawing the image was a challenge already; the composition is, in my terms, unusually complex, not to mention that it had to contain a horse. A horse! These animals are so very difficult to draw – or at least they are to me. One of the problems I have is that I don’t want to copy another artist’s horse; another is that I very rarely find a photo that shows the exact pose I want. So I have to assemble and conjecture, which probably shows.
In any case – whatever is wrong with the horse (or the foreshortening, or whatever), please be kind and don’t point it out to me till next week, okay? There are bound to be mistakes, but I have worked so hard on it that I would like to be oblivious of them for a few days :P.
I do think I need an art beta, though. If there are any volunteers…
1. What I Used
a cheap A4-sized sketchbook
This is just for the preparatory drawing; doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
graphite pencils
I used several types, from soft (B5) to hard (H5). This is just because I gave the sketch more finish than usual; in the case of a preparatory drawing, one pencil will normally do :-).
tracing paper
a Staedtler Pigment Liner drawing pen, size 005
This is the smallest size there is; excellent for fine line-art. I rarely if ever use a broader pen when I plan to work with watercolours.
Cold Pressed (Not) French watercolour paper of a brand called Lana, 300 g/m2 (140 lbs)
This is the smoothest watercolour paper I have come across so far. I like it very much, because it is suitable for work with tracing paper (though you still lose some of the detail) and for detailed line-art, while nevertheless heavy enough to absorb a decent amount of water. Most watercolour artist prefer something with heavier grain, and sometimes I do too – it depends on what effect you want.
Koh-I-Noor Mondeluz watercolour pencils
These are very cheap, really. When I compare them to my Caran d’Ache watercolour pencils, I find that Caran d’Ache (e. g. Clancy) is much smoother and easier to use colour pencil-wise; they leave more solid lines too, whereas Koh-I-Noor pigment dissolves almost completely in water, mixes easily, and is generally more paint-like (e. g. January). I like both, and use each depending on what kind of effect I want.
Cotman watercolours
I have a small pocket box of those, which I bought in order to take my first steps in the world of watercolour. Cotman is the cheap version of Winsor & Newton; most books advise against buying cheap paints, but I just didn’t have the confidence to start with a professional set. Winsor & Newton is a very good brand; I think Cotman is decent enough too.
a fine marten hair brush (number 4)
This is an expensive brush for detailed work – the first thing they say you should buy when you start doing watercolour. I suppose you can survive without it, though, especially if you’re an amateur like me XD.
two Nova synthetic brushes (numbers 5 and 10) of a brand called Da Vinci
I like these very much. Usually, the problem with synthetic brushes is that they can’t hold a lot of water – petit gris is much better. Only, if you are going to be rubbing rather than painting (which is what I do when I use my Mondeluz pencils), synthetic brushes are better because sturdier. Now, Da Vinci’s Nova brushes are excellent in the way that they combine the sturdiness of synthetic hair with a capacity to hold a good quantity of water and to release it slowly. The number 10 is one of my favourite brushes.
2. Pencils
Mostly, when I want to paint something in watercolour, I make a fairly detailed sketch on drawing paper first. This serves several purposes. First of all, the sketch can be ‘belaboured’ at will, and if mistakes cannot be erased (paper is not always that forgiving), that doesn’t matter because they can be corrected during the transfer. Secondly, a design doesn’t always work out, and you don’t want to waste your watercolour paper like that. Third, I am plain bad at figuring out how much space my drawing will take up – I just start somewhere and see where I end up – and transferring allows me to place the image on the proper portion of the final page. On the pencils below you can see that the image is too far to the left; Snape’s cloak can’t pan out properly. I corrected that while transferring it onto watercolour paper by means of tracing paper.
This drawing is really much more elaborate and finished than is usual for something that is ultimately supposed to become a watercolour. That is because, although I had been thinking of colour from the first, I hesitated whether I would make the picture into a painting – it’s such an elaborate process (at least with me), and the subject is sort of silly, even though Snape looks rather tragic. I suppose that one thing that made me decide to continue is the fact that the design was, despite its crack quality, really rather ambitious for someone like me. It seemed worthwhile to take it a little further.
3. Inks
Mostly when I paint with watercolour, I transfer my drawing to the watercolour paper, then perfect the drawing using a hard and very sharp pencil, and finally paint the pencils. If the line-art doesn’t stand out sufficiently, I take my tiny Staedtler pen and lightly trace the linework, touching up. Here, however, I drew the whole design with the Staedtler pen, erased the pencils, and painted the inks. The only other time I have worked like this was when I drew November. I opted for it here because I wanted to keep the details and a certain fine quality of the lines.
Here I hesitated, because I thought the line-art was rather nice and sort of unusual for me in its thinness – usually I go for a bolder quality. I was a bit nervous about ruining it with the paint.
4. Watercolour Pencils
The pencil sketch is dark and grubby, on account of the paper quality as well as the fact that I had to make a lot of corrections – at a certain point some surfaces, like for example Brynhild’s hand, wouldn’t get white anymore despite furious erasing on my part :-). However, my idea of this image was that it should be very light and dainty, to reflect Brynhild’s frivolousness, the Valkyrie’s radiance, and the fact that I’m really poking fun at my own sadness about Snape’s fate. I didn’t want much, or strong, colour, which is why I opted for my Koh-I-Noor watercolour pencils.
If I’m honest, I am not very good at mixing colours with traditional watercolour pans, and I find that I rarely have the amount of control over the material that I want when making something. Opting for a pencil layer first was a sort of safety valve; I have never actually done it before. The Mondeluz pigment can easily be kept very light and transparent; I would give that a go first and then see whether I needed my stronger Cotman colours to add some relief.
As you can see, I added very little colour at all. I brushed the surface lightly with the pencils, determining which colours I was going to use and where (nr. 10 pink, nr. 3 pale and nr. 4 darker yellow, nr. 35 pale grey, nr. 18 sky blue, nr. 36 black, and skin tones of nr. 7 carmine + yellow – nr. 3 pale for Snape and nr. 4 dark for Brynhild). I also indicated where the highlights were going to be, and did some shading on the horse’s body. (When I took the photo, I had forgotten about Snape’s robe and feet…)
That done, I dissolved the pigment by applying water with my synthetic brushes. The result looked like this:
5. Watercolour Paint
The Koh-I-Noor-coloured picture was very, very pale; I needed a more solid black for Snape’s hair and robes, stronger shading for the horse’s body, and some darker nuances for Brynhild’s scarf. Because of the sober colour scheme I had chosen, I didn’t need to mix my paint; I could just use lamp black, Payne’s grey, Alizarin crimson and cobalt blue with varying amounts of water. I used my marten brush for details and my number 10 Da Vinci brush for larger surfaces. The black and grey took several coatings. I also added a grey wash to Snape’s face.
Though watercolour doesn’t allow you to make a lot of corrections, I find that it does let me play around a bit if I spot a mistake quickly and add more water. I’m also trying to get different effects by using wet-on-wet versus wet-on-dry, but I’m afraid that in general my skill is pretty limited, and most of the effects I get are by chance rather than purposefully done :D.
When the painting was dry, I scanned it. Scans of watercolour pictures never entirely look like the original in terms of colour, it seems, or at least not the way I make them; I always have some adjusting to do and it still won’t look the same. But if I can’t have an exact copy, I don’t mind settling for a better version ;P. I like to enhance the contrast a bit, and if all goes well, the image gets a kind of glow-like quality that the original doesn’t have.
And then the thing is ready for posting.
The Ride of the Valkyrie
I shouldn’t have been drawing and writing this when I still owe:
bethbethbeth a drawing;redvelvetcanopy a drawing;somebody at
dh_predictions a drabble/drawble/ficlet/whatever;lots of people replies to their comments on my previous two posts;
and the world (;P) a heap of RL writing –
…But I couldn’t help it. Will change my wicked ways as best I can. Trying to catch up.
