“Decision Four”
Watercolor is my worst medium. I’m not as good at it as I am with oils, acrylic, markers, pencils, or ink. I don’t know why. I just have never found my place with it. But I seem to be always trying it every now and again. It has an appeal to me.
I especially like watercolor in pans. That’s the kind you always see in random stores for kids. It’s a tiny little round or rectangular container filled with dry paint that you then wet and the paint comes to life. You have to keep rewetting the paint as you work and depending on how much water you add the paint is lighter or darker. A lot of water and it’s pretty transparent without much pigment in it. It also comes in tubes but I prefer the pans.
Over the last year and a half or so I bought a bunch of new watercolor pan sets. I bought one main set that has twenty four colors in it and then four smaller six to eight color sets that are more gimmicky specialty sets. One set is “Graphite” colors. They look like the color of a graphite pencil with a little bit of red, blue, or yellow thrown in. I think the other three sets are all a little shiny. There are flakes of stuff in them to make them iridescent.
I made some small 2.5×3.5 inch art cards with these sets last year but they were nothing special. I could have just as easily used my markers for them but I wanted to try the new watercolor sets. I don’t think I did anything of note with them except those small cards.
One thing I did do with the sets is to swatch them. Since they are small sets I took a sheet of 5×7 inch watercolor paper (one piece per set) and put down a sample of each color. Some of the iridescent sets were made to work on a dark background so for those I put down some India ink on half the paper and swatched the color on both black and white.
By the way I love the way these swatches look. Sometimes I think the swatches are the best watercolor art that I’ve made. All the various colors lined up and easily seen on a piece of paper. There is something simple and appealing to me about a set of swatches.
What got me going again with the watercolors is my 5×7 inch talking superhero cartoon art cards. There are the cartoons that I’m doing that I’m going to post next year. It’s the head and shoulders of a superhero with a word balloon above him. I’ve been doing a bunch of these lately. I’ve been drawing them on the iPad, printing them out in blue line, and then inking them on a 5×7 inch piece of paper. The final step is to color them and for that I’ve been using my markers.
The problem was that after about thirty of them I was getting bored with the markers. Since I’ve been getting one “Dreams of Things” cover done a week in marker I was growing tired of the medium and wanted to change things up. So that’s when I decided to pull out one of my watercolor sets.
Though I knew I would be using the main twenty four color watercolor set I pulled out the graphite set first. Usually the first thing I do with these art cards is to color the background. For the marker ones I chose a dark and light marker of a single color and color the top light and the bottom dark and then scumble them together in the middle. For these I wanted the backgrounds to be a single graphite color.
One of the advantages of watercolor is that I can get dark and light out of a single pan of color. I add more water for light and more paint for dark. With watercolor you can get a lot of cool effects just by how you put the paint on the paper. I’m not particularly skilled at doing that but I thought I could make a nice background with the graphite ones and I think I did.
I was working four faces at a time on four different pieces of paper. I find this to be an advantage for me because when using watercolor you often have to wait for the water in the paint to dry. During that time I can just switch to another face. This keeps me going and I’m always up for less waiting.
I’m better with the medium of gouache (also a watercolor) than regular watercolor because gouache allows me some opacity while watercolor is all transparent. Gouache takes longer for me to finish a painting in though. So I said to myself that these heads would have no gouache in them and I’d work only with transparency. So that’s what I set out to do.
Markers are also a transparent medium and I had been coloring these faces with marker for a while. So I ended up following my marker technique except with the watercolors. First I laid down big chunks of transparent color and then I added more pigment to my brush and put down some darker color. I blended the darks and lights together and repeated the process until I got what I was looking for.
In the end I managed to get all four faces done in about the same amount of time that it would have taken me if I had used markers. This surprised me a little because I thought it would take me a lot longer since it was a less familiar medium. But since it was such a familiar task it really didn’t.
The next step is to do something less familiar with the watercolors. The problem is that I’m not sure what that is exactly. I have some vague ideas in my head to paint something at 11×17 inches but scaling up isn’t always easy. I also have some vague ideas about seeing the drawing I make simple but I still have no idea what the image should be. I’m going to have to look through some of my inkbooks with all my little drawings in them and pick one. Or I could possibly look through my scans of finished but unused drawings. I’ll let you know.