What I like about watercolors, aside from the fact that it is odorless (ideal for people with asthma like me) is the watermark that it leaves on paper when it dries.With acrylic paints, its mostly the brushstrokes that shows which often feels heavy for me. With watercolors, there's a tiny bit of serendipity in play and I look forward to being surprised at what the water does to the paint as it flows. I love the natural lightness to it too.
But what I find challenging with watercolors is that it's sometimes hard to make the outlines distinctive.I often find myself painting over the dark areas a couple of times to achieve the contrast that I like and then I end up painting over the other areas to match the now darker areas which then messes up the lovely watermarks from the initial underpaint.
So recently, I tried using ink to outline and emphasize the darker areas. I do find that I get the best results if I don't ink it all. I leave some areas without the black ink outline and just ink in the areas where I'd like the details to show. In this way, by not outlining all edges, I get to veer away from having my painting look like a comic strip (as what usually happens with ink drawings) and have it look more fluid and lighter. What do you think?
4 comments:
Thanks Din! Good to see you here. ;)
I truly love your watercolour sketch, Emilie! Colourful (and as another commentator mentioned)very vibrant! I've been thinking about giving watercolour illustrations a try so your text is interesting on a practical level, too. Well done!
I truly love your watercolour sketch, Emilie! Colourful (and as another commentator mentioned) very vibrant! I've been thinking about giving watercolour illustrations a try so your text is interesting on a practical level, too. Well done!
Thanks Lea! :) And yes, you should give watercolor a try. I've also just discovered Gouache, which is also waterbased but is opaque. I'm quite liking it very much. I'll talk about it in my next post.
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