Painting with Watercolours!

This week, I began my adventures in watercolour painting.

The idea for this began with some brainstorming for my IPP for school. I knew I wanted to some kind of story-telling art book, but I hadn't come up with a story yet - and the style had to match the story. As the idea for my story slowly began to form, I decided that watercolour would suit the tone of the story best.

The problem was, though, that I had not painted at all since elementary school. Remember those crappy little paint sets that dried and cracked really horribly? Yeah. Those. But, I figured I had to give it a shot, because I could just feel that it would be awesome.

So, last Friday, I went to the little art shop across the street from my school to get some supplies. I bought some 140lb watercolour paper, a basic set of 12 paint tubes, and some brushes - totaling about $23 with my student discount. I then went to Dollarama to pick up a little plastic palette for mixing, a white out pen, and some tape.

Before I started actually painting, I became rather nervous. What if I still painted like a fifth grader? What if I couldn't paint well to save my life? Then I'd have to completely re-thing my style choice for my book.

But when I finally started painting on Thursday, things went surprisingly well. Mixing colours really wasn't much of a problem, I guess because I had a good feel of it from my digital colouring, and I remembered to take into consideration the fact that the paint dries lighter. The biggest challenge was really just getting the technique down - how to blend the colours into each other, how much water to have on my brush, etc.

When I finished my first piece (which was actually my "tooling around" - I did nothing with the paint before this!) I was pretty impressed with myself. I figured out that I painted the way I wished i could digitally colour.

 

I also learned how well fingers can come into play - although I supposed paper towel would have a similar effect. When I went to do the gray shading on the eye, it actually came out too dark, and too much water (so there was like a blob of water just waiting there, threatening to spread and ruin the eye). So I panicked and wiped it with my finger, and it came out looking lovely!

When I started on my second piece - a character I have in mind for my story, in fact - I began applying and starting to refine some of the techniques I had already learned with blending.

Although I made - and will probably continue to make - a number of mistakes with the piece (eg. I was messing around a lot and lost a bunch of colour pigments in parts), I am still happy with how it is going, and am proud of myself for starting this adventure.