Tutorials
First what we will need to learn is how to apply color (which is like the hardest part), then we will move on with some of the most common effects.
I drew a Kiki, for this excersise, which is a simple drawing to start with. I know you guys want to go to the heavy duty stuff, but if we go straight to that, I know you guys are gonna get a little bit desperate. Once we know how to apply the color and how to solve common problems, THEN we will move on to a full illustration, o.k?
There are lots of ways of applying watercolor. Mainly the technique branches into Wet and Dry. the differences from one another lies in how you prepare your canvas. Wet, implies sticking your piece of paper to a hard surface and damp it with water and for this, I'm afraid you have to be sort of skilled to achieve good results. I honestly never liked the Wet Techinque as it requieres a lot of preparation ONLY for the canvas to be ready for painting, and also one needs to have another person to set the canvas properly on the hard surface and so on. Dry, however it's faster and less messy and for fan art purposes works just fine. So well, with that being said, we are going to work on a dry canvas. For this purpose I used a sheet of strathmore block (cold press. the rest of the materials are listed below).
Anyway, this Kiki was drawn using a staedler's lumocholor lead that
won't smudge when the watercolor has been applied. You can use a watercolor
pencil (derrewent's or Faber Castell's) or to spare yourselves for
the search of this item, ink the drawing. just please, be sure the
ink you are using is labeled waterproof. Although I must warn you
sometimes, even when the bottle says "waterproof", the
lines might as well smudge as soon as the water touches them. To
be sure run a test: draw a line with the ink, wait for it to dry and then with
your brush apply a little bit of water. If the lines stay were they
should, you are very ready to go.
Now for this excersice the materials we are gonna need are:
1.-Clean
Table |
2.-Half
pan watercolors |
3.-"Round"
Brushes (01, 03) |
| 4.- Eyedropper or syringe |
| 5.-Regular containers (4. two for water and 1 to mix the color) |
| 6.- A sheet of watercolor paper (cold press, most likely) |
| 7.- A cloth, and napkins (I recommend you those that are used for cooking, the thick ones) |
Working Area
Our
working area is very importat when it comes to watercolor.
If you don't have a drawing table, you can always improvise
a space for work. The picture above, shows, the
table I used to eat at. I chose this space in my house 'cause I
get a lot of light -the table is next to a huge window (it's
always convenient to draw near a window. Having poor light
always causes headaches and eye damage in thelong run)-. Notice the materials were placed according to the hand I use for drawing. Since
I'm right handed, I placed containers, watercolors and brushes
on the right side. If
you are a leftie, well, then you should place all your materials
on the left side of the table. That way you can
rotate the drawing freely in case you need to with your free
hand, without risking having one of the containers
spill all over your drawing by accident.
If you are one of those who eats while drawing, I recommend you to put your food, in a plate far away from the sheet of drawing, as it certainly catches and absorbs almost everything that is spilled or spattered or etc, on it.
Now, before you start to paint, wash your hands and etc. Let's keep it clean shall we? Very well then. Let's start by mixing the colors. First we are going to apply a base coating, to the drawing. In this case I mean: the shadows. Yes, I know it's kind of weird, but when you paint a complicated illustration were there are many characters, you want them to be integrated to an atmosphera and this is easily achieved if first you lay all the color for the shadows in the first round. Of course since this is only an excersice we are going to start by applying shadows to ONE character.
What color should I use as a base?
Well,
some of the people use violet, cause it's a color than blends very nicely with with whatever color you add
next. But let's be a little bit risky today (just so you know
that you can use whatever color you want. Kiki's
base coating will be pink... sorta saturated pink.
So we take half pan with the pink, and make the mix. Add little painting
to the container and later on add water (use the eyedropper
for this).
As you can see I have two water containers. One with clean water and one that I will use to do the mix. It's important that you have them both, because other than washing the brush to pick a new color, you will need clean water for several purposes, through out the WHOLE process. like for spreading out color etc.. Using the 'dyed' water would certainly spoil your drawing as it would end up mixing, even with the color you already applied. The napking that you see there is necessary also. It's needed to dry the excess of water off the brush. It's important to notice that it's a paper towel, not a napkin.
Now here's the trick. When applying WC what you do is this:
A) Dip the brush in your mix
B) 'Tap' the tip of your brush against the napkin. Remove excedent of water
C) Apply color.
You must not skip step 'B'. That way you'll prevent those horrible marks of water or that nasty drops of mix come out of the hair of your brush spoiling the drawing, o.k?
If you are not sure of the color , you can do a color test (that's what I did here :D). I'm using a medium brush.
As
you see in the picture, the paint looks all washed out. this happens when you add
little paint to your mix. It creates a thin layer of painting. We need
it like that because this is the first coat of paint we are gonna apply
to the drawing. It's important also, that you have another sheet
of paper, or some left outs in the border so that you can do
tests of color before you apply the watercolor in the drawing.
Now
we start to apply our mix to Kiki. As you can see, It barely
shows any trace of color.
Notice the watercolor has been applied where the shadows would
be. Under his bangs, chin, nose, eyes, cheeks and some areas
of the hair.
As this is the first coat of painting, wait for it to dry a
little, then add more paint to the previous mix (without adding
more water, we just want to add more pigment to it); this will intensify the color and will deepen the
shadow. Where you want it to be more shadowed, you apply more
paint and so on.
Like
this see?. (you can even see that the paper was still wet).
It's important for you to know, that watercolor is not like other
media were you can cover big areas (or small) by adding more
painting to the mix. Here that won't work. It'll just botch
the drawing.Watercolor
is a technique that needs patience. You add the color, then
you wait, and then you add a second coat and then you wait. Painting with watercolor
is like pulling pictures out of the mist. Little by little
you start seeing your drawing as you add coats of painting
(of course it also depends of what you want to achive).
Anyway, when your drawing is DRY (notice this please), we
can move on to apply the next layers of colors.
SKIN
-----
When the drawing has been shadowed I always recommend to start
with the skin of your character, especially if you have other elements surrounding him or her. Of course in this case, we have no background at all, so we will proceed to color
kiki's skin. In
an illustration with a background is highly recommended to
do the background first and the character(s) at the end.
As you can see, most of the watercolor kits doesn't have er.."skin color". This of course puts a heavy dilemma if you don't know what to mix to get the damned color. But don't panic, cause it's very easy to get the "skin color" out of a basic watercolor set.
You will need: Canary Yellow (or yellow) +Crimson Red.
With your eyedropper add water to a new space in your palette.
Then add yellow as a base and then a little bit of red. Try
the color out as it's shown in the picture. If you are satisfied
with the results, then apply the color. If you think the mix
is still to reddish add an itsy bitsy amount of white (be
careful when adding this color o.k?)Notice that the color resulted from the mix is like a pumpikin
sort of shade. It's really vivid. Now in the picture below,
notice how the color looses its concentration (so to speak)
when applied. It's just a perfect skin color (that's why I
said you should try the color out, before you do anything
else). Sometimes mixing "skin color" takes a lot of practice
to get it right. So be patience. Though it's a little bit...
complicated in the beggining is not imposible :)
Now,
we apply the mix in Kiki's face. Now here's the trick, to
apply the color evenly. You have to start applying the color
in the areas you previously shadowed and move evenly towards
the clean areas. As you apply the first base you will notice
that the first layer won't cover the pink shadows. Well, don't
panic, just wait a little bit for it to dry an apply a second
coat ofcolor. Again start with the shadowed parts and then
move out to the clean areas. As you can see kiki starts to
have some sort of volume and depth as soon as you start adding
more and more layers . the drawing does not looks "flat". When you are satisfied with the skin, let it dry a little bit. While this happens, you can start mixing your next color.
HAIR
-------------------
Now,
let's move on with the Hair. Since Kiki is a radish head sorta
brat, we will need crimson red to do the mix.
If you don't have a deep red in your watercolors you can always
create one. Add just a little bit of pink to the red you have
and voilá. That always works :). Again before you apply
do all the nessesary color tests before you apply the mix
(As shown to the left).
In this case, prepare a thin mix of color. we will be adding
more watercolor to the basic mix to deepen the color of Kiki's
hair.
Follow the same steps to apply the color,
as you did with the skin. Remember: always apply the color
first in the shadowed parts and then move to the clean areas. Also before you apply it, remember to dry the excess
of water with your 'napkin'. o.k? Of course this is just a basic sorta hair.
Had you wanted a more elaborated hair, you would have had
to shadow it more throughly.
Remember this is just a example. befor Da Vinci crafted the
Mona Lisa, I'm sure he did a lot of sketches and why not?
a lot of stick figures :)))
Now, that you have applied the first layer, add more red to your mix. This is to deepen the color cause we are gonna cover the last traces of the pink and give with this, volume to the hair. Now to deepen the colors, (any color) don't use black. It will just dirty your artwork. You can add some other color, like brown or even some sort of blue. As before, remember to make some color tests before you apply ANY color. If the color satisfies you, then go ahead, and apply it following the same procedure as with the skin.
Now proceed to apply the new mix to the Hair. Remember that before you do, you have to let the last layer dry. Other wise the color will just peel off the drawing. As before, follow the previous steps when applying the color.
Dip brush + dry water excess with napkin + apply color (first shadow, then clean areas) + let it dry.
CLOTH
---------
Before
we move on to detail our image, we apply the color of the
cloth. You will just need yellow, that's it. Add to the container
some yellow and little water and there you go. Follow, yet again the same procedure as with the skin and
hair. It's
really easy, see? Now this time let the thing dry. Detailing will need the canvas
to be completely dry.
DETAILS
----------------
It's time to switch the brush dudes!!!. Until
now we've been working with a medium sized brush. Well, now
we will need a round tip -01 brush .
As it's shown in the picture we will dip the tip of our brush
in water (just dip, not submerge)and we are gonna take it directly
from the half pan the watercolor, as if we were using some
sort of oils or acrylics. With
care, we are going to line kiki's eyes. I used brown color
cause you know, kiki's is not a woman. Black liner would have
made him look like a cheap whore, you know... If you feel that the half pan is retaining
the color, you just have to dip your medium sized brush in
water and then pass is all over the half pan. That way the
surface of it will be damp and that will allow you to pick
the color easily.
Notice how the line in the eyes deepend his
eyes, and made the drawing look more alive (and he indeed
looks pissed..)
Following the same steps, we will use red, pink or even purple
color to color kiki's forehead marks.
Now the Eyes. In this you can either pick
the color directly from the half pan, or make a mix in one
of the palette's containers.
The picture is a little bit blurred (sorry) but in the second
picture, you can actually see that I applied a light shade
of blue and later on following the same steps of Kiki's eye
lines, I marked the lines inside the eyes.
Also with a little bit of Brown I lined his eyebrows or...
well, you know, he doesn't have eyebrows, but still.
I outlined the place where the eyebrows should be, and this
also strenghtened his espression. At this point you can start to define some of the parts of
the cloth. I know that the thing he has on, it's not a real cloth,
still it gives us sort of the idea, you know? Anyway to the yellow mix that you did, when applying the first
layer of the color, add to it a little bit of brown. As it is already dry it won't be much of a trouble to apply
the second layer.
Adding this dark color to the lighter one, you'll be able tocreate
contrast and this is really helpful when coloring metal pieces
and stuff. Of course this is just in an attempt to emmulate metal (cause
I know it doesn't look like metal). To
this drawing you can actually add a lot of effects. For example
you could add white touches with the Gel pen, so that the
cloth will look polished. Or you can also add some more hightlight
to the hair, or even different shades of red.
It all depends of what you want to achive in the final drawing.
This
is the finished drawing. Notice that this is ONLY an excersise to
apply the color for you to get familiarized with it (cause this
drawing indeed could have endeed being more complicated than this).
Practice this easy steps at home and watercolor will be much easier
for you. the trick lies in knowing how to apply the color. There
are of course many ways of applying color, like wetting the paper
before one applies the color and etc.
I like this way, cause it's easy and you don't need to prepare a
canvas or anything. And for Fan art purposes its quick!! and it
also gives you nice results. Next excersice I will show you how
to do a full illustration from beggining to end.
I hope this tutorial helped you out. Oh and if you have any questions
just ask! :)))
Credits: Saint Seiya and all it's awesomeness, belongs to Masami Kurmada and Toei Animation. Art
Belongs to Aurea Freniere. Menu buttons were fetched out and modified from Dynamic Drive CSS Library
Images and everything else belongs to me. Please respect!