How I watercolor with little artistic knowledge

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Moiscen
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Welcome to my journal! Main reason I'm doing this is to test out a cool CSS thing! Because I love to waste time like that. But then, since I have not made a WIP journal in a while, I thought, "why not? Especially since I realized I have never done a painting WIP series, only for my splatter ink ones. Now I see why - when you're working with watercolor, everything dries so fast!

Even so, here it is! I'm going to try to give some hints or tips, especially for beginners. But first thin you should know is that I don't work professionally. At all. I'm really messy and I'm always covered in ink afterwards. Furthermore, as seen above, I have to edit my paintings a bit before I post them, because I don't have a scanner. Generally, I take photographs during the day, when I can get the best lighting.

I hope you enjoy! Feel free to ask any more questions in the comments!


Material:

Before you watercolor, good things to have on hand:
  • Paintbrushes - many sizes; soft ones are the best, in my experience.
  • Water, for mildly obvious reasons
  • A palette (for paint). I don't wash my palette. Watercolor is great that way! So you don't have to mourn the beautiful colors you make when you are done painting. I haven't washed my palette in over a year c:.
  • Tissue paper (I use toilet paper oho so professional) - is good for when you put too much water
  • Scrap watercolor paper - very useful for testing out colors before you actually put them on paper. For me, with my limited knowledge of color and how you make actual color, my creative process is a long string of trial and error. Recommended if you have trouble remembering how much is dark, and how to mix!
  • Also, pencils and erasers - kneaded erasers are the best. Often, use light pencil to sketch out what you want to paint, so it is easy to erase later!
  • Good quality watercolor paper - it is really worth it! Because with good quality paper, it doesn't bend and give as much, and it holds much more water! Sadly, my scrap paper is actually made of better quality paper than my painting (scrap papers can be recycled too!)


Okay, so important, important! Most important and literally probably the only thing I needed to master before I started actually being somewhat satisfied with my art: LAYERS. Time and time again, it is really good to start with light, base colors. With watercolor, it always looks darker when it is wet. So don't worry too much about your base colors being too dark; but they should be fairly light. It's good to mix them a bit; for this I used a mix of grown, green and blue for colors. I knew that I'd give Eren shadow-y eyes, so greenish kinda worked, and I know he has kind of beige tan skin.

Also, if you have base colors, sometimes it is good to blend them when they are wet. It's really trial and error, but the nice thing about watercolor is that if you make a mistake, add water, and you can pretty much erase it.

Further layering on skin! You go from dark to light, but usually, when painting a face, I go over it at least three times, each time with slightly darker color, and less water. As you go on, generally, I tend to use less and less water, because the colors stay dark. It's VERY hard to layer if you use a lot of water - usually if you add too much water when you are layering, the paint bleeds through and blends all the layers below it. Be careful! That's the downside of 'eraseable' paint, haha.

Usually, during these stages, the people are SUPPOSED to look unnatural and weird and if you are questioning your decision to have ever begun painting, you're doing it right.
 
My paintbrush slipped and Eren has fabulous eyelashes oops

Basically, do the layering thing with the hair. Base color first! Fun thing with the hair is that you can mix dark and light for a base, with a lot of water, so you can get this cool hair look. That has big areas of dark and light. It doesn't have to look neat yet!

It is always a good idea with 'realistic' watercolor hair to do this, because if you just paint the strands without a base, often it might be very time consuming. This is the short cut easy way that I do it because lazy and not a real artist.

Even with black hair, it's good to have a color underneath, like a pale blue.
  • Black - light blue/brown
  • Redhead - light orange
  • Brunette - light brown
  • Blonde - very light pale grey/blue
Um

Many many layers of dark brown. I actually don't have a nice brown color, so when I did was mix this horribly bright brown with horribly bright blue, and then a lot of black and a bit of green and I got this color. <:

With watercolors, you inevitably WILL have to mix a lot of colors, and it is really trial and error. I know some artists actually know what they are doing, but I"m not one of them. All I know is, trial and error, use your scrap paper a LOT. ALSO, when you get a color you really like, make a lot of it and put it in your palette. And you have it saved for the next few months. c:
 

Make final clear lines with a thin paintbrush.It makes it look so much neater that way, but with minimal effort. I got lazy, you make the titan and then you realize you have no energy to actually paint it so you resort to your usual splatter ink ways.

Also, when I was painting Eren, after the many layers dried, I wnet over a bit of it with pen (white gel pen) for fine details, like a bit of touch up on the eyes, the nose, and chin. c:  If my person had white hair, I'd usually touch up there as well.
Legit: randomly splatter ink around. I have an ink bottle too, but I actually had a base layer of black watercolor, then covered it with ink. For the brush effect, I used that funny brush that looks like a fan. It makes cool lines. Just make sure to use it dry, because when it is wet, it usually makes thick, clean separated lines, and I kind of wanted the messy look.

And last photo finished! I hope this was useful! It took so much coding oh my gosh ;0;


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feurae's avatar
feurae
I love how the picture is part of the journal as you scroll through. Wow MoiMoi senpai, teach me your CSS ways *A*

It's really helpful what you're doing to beginners! And also very good that you focused on repeating "trial and error", because no matter how many tutorials one sees and learns from, really the only master is yourself and how you fuck it up. I've learned so many times omg

I also want to start with watercolor at some point, but maybe more in the future (i.e. when I have money and shit ;n; ) so now I know all your secrets muaAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAH coughcoughgh