Mercurial

blue pencil and watercolors on watercolor paper

I haven't drawn or painted anything traditionally in a long while. Here's what I got after trying my hand out at watercolor after years of not touching the stuff. I'm not entirely happy with it. Still, I'm content for now considering that my usual medium is acrylic on canvas so this was a pretty big step. I MUST PRACTICE MORE!

Method:
I started this by sketching with a mechanical pencil with blue lead, very lightly and carefully to avoid damaging the grain of the paper if I had to erase lines.
Regardless of the medium, I seem to have a habit of layering colors so I started out with underpainting. I blocked in the shading of the skin using blue and green tones.
So I had a girl with blue-green skin. I then glazed thin layers of warmer tones over to neutralize the blue, and just worked on building up the colors until I got my desired values and depth.
For the background I just kind of went crazy and experimented with bleeds and blending.

Subject Matter:
I wasn't really thinking when I drew this. Just let my hand run wild so I'd have something to color in. I'll work on compositions and perhaps try drawing something with more depth and realism next time. I'm just glad I was able to shake off some dust and get moving again.


I'm sure there are a lot of you who will want to critique the anatomy but I wasn't going for realism here. I'm not readyyy. I shall practice on my deformed- er, stylized people for the meantime.


_{Special thanks to Miguel ~merkymerx who has kicked me out of inactivity by insisting that we have watercolor sessions, and also to China *snowpeachdrop for encouraging me to paint again and lending me her watercolor book to serve as a guide.}