Doing commissions are really fun. They let me break out of my subject comfort-zone (most of the time), the person getting the art is happy, and I’m happy because I get paid. Everybody wins! I just finished up this commission with watercolors for a friend and decided to catalog my process, especially my process working with Watercolor. People have asked me in the past how I work with it because most individuals find it very difficult to work with. Watercolor requires just the right amount of patience, as working with any medium, though not as much as perhaps working with oil paint. Watercolor is much more forgiving then most people think. If you’re using a watercolor paper as your surface, you can easily tab what you don’t like off with a napkin. For me, I usually prefer illustration board because I like the visual effect I get when the paint soaks into the board.
Let’s begin! (Note: Tons of pictures!)
Step 1: Composition sketches. I usually start with some quick gestural drawings/thumbnails to kind of work out the idea in my head. I find if I skip right to the final project, I would be throwing out a bunch of papers with half-drawn ideas. It’s good to have something solid to go on. For this painting, I chose the one one on the lower left column and on top (left page) I drew a larger sketch to work out some of the anatomy.
Step 2: Very tight drawing on 18″x24″ watercolor paper. Here I’m using Strathmore Coldpress 140lbs. (I prefer the coldpress texture.) I try to make the pencil drawing as tight and crisp as possible since I layer very thin layers of watercolor on top. I like some of the sketch to come through but not all of my extraneous lines…I’m a very messy sketcher.
Step 3: Now I put on the base paint. In watercolor, you should always layer and work back to front. Sometimes I’ll do a wash all over but here I did coats of what I wanted the background to be. I use a technique here called wet on wet where you put down the water on the paper and then add your color. It gives it that smearing texture and also makes the pigment go a little farther. I was very precise around the character in this stage, I didn’t want to get the background colors on it quite yet.
Step 4: Here we go! Layering! If you don’t like to wait for the paint to dry, you can always use a hairdryer in between coats. The colors are usually lighter after they dry so I have to make several layers. But layering is also good! It lets you get lots of cool colors built on top of each other. You can see in the wings I added the yellow at the top for the glow and then went in with browns, blues, grays, and reds.
Step 5: Base colors for the character. A trick I use for human skin is Peach Watercolor Pencil. That’s right, you don’t have to use the tube watercolors to get cool effects! A watercolor pencil can help you be precise and get a color that you may have difficulty mixing. Here I used dark blue for the shadows and I touch areas lightly, or not at all, that I want to have highlights.
Here’s a picture of my tools and work area. Right now I’m working at my kitchen table for these big paintings. The watercolors I have there are Prangs and the cup has colored pencils and watercolor pencils. I guess I should mention that my paintings aren’t entirely watercolor. I will layer up the painting with colored pencils in between washes and then add acrylic paint in places I either want to highlight or darken. In this painting, I used a lot of white on the wings to get a feathery look. The brushes I use are a mix of gouache brushes and watercolor brushes. I will use a big fat brush for washes as well as mopping up watercolor I don’t want. As long as the paint is still wet, it’s easy to get back off the paper if you don’t like it.
Step 6: Add acrylic highlights. Here’s a close up of the face mid-process. You can see the places I added white acrylic. I also didn’t add a lot of blue on his robe because I wanted to make it look shear.
Step 7: This is the stage for final touch-ups. I decided I wanted more of a halo in the background so I brought the blue over the yellow. I darkened up more areas in the lower half of the painting to help bring out the face (which I was trying to make the focal point of the painting).
Finally, sign and mat and: TA-DA! Painting is done! That one was fun to do so I hope I can do more commissions in the future!
What do you think of using watercolors? Easy, difficult? Hopefully this post inspires you to go and make some really great art!
