Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Comfort Zone painting tutorial

Welcome to another series of my step by step watercolor panting tutorials.
Today's piece was my entry for the  de kahon art fair at the collective. Did this artwork in 4 days. (Monday-Thursday) then submitted it on Friday just in time for the show on Saturday!

I already have an idea in my mind. I just sketched it first and draw it in my computer. I did this to get the values first. When I'm happy with the composition I tried to add colors and experiment. (I used photoshop to add the shadows and colors for the study, since I don't have enough time to do this traditionally, thank you photoshop! :) changing colors is just a click away!)

Step 1:  Wash
Used the wet on wet technique. I used yellows and some greens as base colors to give a warm tone to the artwork. As you can see the paper is very wet, I love how the colors bleed. After this I left the painting to dry.




step 2: Fill in the base colors
When the paper is dry I started filling in the rest of the colors. I checked my study in photoshop for the color palette and started painting. These are just base colors. Note: Used light colors for the base then started building up the colors with darker tones.


Step 3: Adding foreground and overlaying colors
After the base colors are dry, the next step is to add the foreground and to slowly build the colors by adding color overlays. 
FOREGROUND: I added bushes and trees for the foreground. This also helps me frame the piece and lead the viewer's eyes to the subject. 
OVERLAYS: I used darker shades of greens to build up the colors of the bushes. I used my liner brush for the leaves. These are applied using the dry on dry technique.



Step 4: Adding details
Used the liner brush and watercolor pencils to add the details. This took a while maybe around two sessions for the details alone. At this stage the image starts to come alive. Adding the shadows and highlights really made the arwork pop! :)




Step 5: Final Artwork
After this I gave myself a pat on the back and went to sleep! :) Thank you for reading this tut. Comments & suggestions are very much appreciated. 




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