How I paint – Teach Your (Bloggers) Well

Tags

Art, Art Tutorial, Daily Prompy, dailypromt, fantasy, Painting, postaweek2014, Tutorial, water colour

So today’s Daily Prompt actually sat quite well with something I was planning on doing. So without further ado … a really lame tutorial on how I do my paintings. Firstly I do a lot of things that would make ‘serious’ and ‘proper’ water colourists cry. Like, use white paint, or even white gel pen for highlights. I also use black, I don’t make the paints that watery, I rarely blend them in with each other, rather cell shade. I tend to have some quite hard lines. I really just use it as some thing to add colour to line drawings. Because that is how I do it, I don’t want to be a traditional watercolour painter.

The tools

So we start with tools … water paints, pallet, brushes, eraser, hb mechanical pencil, toilet paper, and Gel/Chalk Pens.

I always sketch out a very simple composition and initial sketch with pencil. I then line or ‘ink’ the entire thing with water colours. Either burnt Umber or Paynes Grey as they tend to be the colours which best disappear as the the rest of the paint goes on. I like to paint very small, and my paintings are very rarely even as big as A4. This gives me room on the page though to do my colour swatches. I try as hard as i can to limit the pallet, as i can go a bit mental with the colours on days. .

‘Inked’ Sketch

Always start from the back and work to the front. I am guilty og having always done the bits I wanted to do first … which A, makes It difficult to work about any main foreground elements (which usually are the fun bit) B) Even in water colour you can paint over it if you accidentally go Into the foreground elements.

Use sponges of different types (synthetic, natural) for textures.

Once you have done all of that boring stuff, get the to foreground. If I ever have a strong light source, before I paint, i get the pencil back out and draw the areas in that I want to be highlighted, Shadowed and Mids and write a little L,M,S in each patch. Effectively making myself a paint by numbers.

I haven’t actually finished this yet, however here is a very short video showing how I paint and what the toilet paper is for. Water colours to me are for pigment, not for water effect, so as I paint i then suck all the water up with tissue. This also means, as I am an impatient soul, that I can get through an image quicker if i don’t have to wait for water patches to dry!

http://youtu.be/ZAVc2U1_IOo

So that’s about all I can teach, about something I do well. And that isn’t even complete. But the most important lesson I feel I art Is – Do what you like. So if I can teach you anything It is to enjoy it, create your own technique, style and Path.

🙂

Other things worth Learning!