Step-by-Step Watercolor

This portrait of my buddy Captain Christian Lapp was done in a small sketchbook I have as an experiment and attempt to gain some confidence in myself.  I’m not very strong in my application of watercolor and used this as a deliberate practice, and in hopes to create a little work of pride. I also want to talk through my process here and a few things I learned along the way.

Step 1: I started in my selection of a photo I took on my phone. This was a low-Res photo and I did this on purpose. Let me start by saying, I typically don’t work from photos - it is always best practice to work from life (a topic for another post).  But my reasoning here was to slow the process and focus on what I had seen as weaknesses that needed some special attention (ie. Proportions, color, and medium application). Additionally, the lack of detail in the phot kept me focused on the “meat” of the photo instead of the details.

Step 1a: With a focus on proportional, I spent extra time to get the shapes, angles and relationships right with sole dependence on visual measurements. I didn’t use a ruler, grids, or tracing paper. This I considered a success.so once the line work was down, and I was confident in the sketch, I can move tolaying down the first wash.

Step 2: In this step I added a base wash - using the “parent” color that would serve as the under tone I could build on. In other words, this decision in color is a rough target only to serve as a base relation in which we can shift to the lighter/darker value as we move forward. Whatever gets shown through at the finish adds to the variation of color that often makes artwork more interesting and realistic.

Step 3: Here you see the final product. Granted there are about five layers of color washes. The trick to success is the work from light to dark - meaning you need to already identify you highlighted areas and work around them, and your darker/darkest areas get additional washes and pigment. Marc Holmes describes it as Tea, Milk, Honey to illustrate (no pun intended) the water to pigment ratio you use as you progress in layering for values/color.