Draughts

Over Christmas, while I had a small window of time where I didn't need to be working all the time (December-January is usually pretty crazy for me) I let myself do one watercolour, all for myself. I'd just finished several extremely tight deadlines and thought I deserved a bit of a play at Christmas time!

I do most of my work digitally these days, but I do love my watercolours, so I decided that I'd do a traditional painting - and to make it interesting, I decided to work with Mariella, my little ghost character, and see if I could pull that off with watercolour.

Keep reading below the cut for sketches, progress shots, videos and all that fun stuff!

To keep my sanity, I didn't come up with an entirely new image. I had a sketch I'd done of Mariella for Colour Collective back in 2016. It was a popular post, and I always rather liked it... but it was only done very quickly, after all. I thought it deserved a bit more time and effort.

I started off by doing some fresh, tight linework in Photoshop (using my Wacom Mobile Studio Pro). I wanted to fix all the little things that bugged me in the original sketch:

I then traced it all onto Moleskine watercolour paper (I like their paper, so I buy the A3 sketchbooks and pull them to bits). I traced Mariella and Verity (and the paintings) with pencil because I didn't want them to have solid outlines:

But the rest directly with ink (FW Acrylic Artists Ink in Burnt Umber) and a brush.

I then started off with rough washes:

I posted my progress to my Instagram Story - currently it's all visible in a moment on my IG profile. I haven't put every post in this blog post ... but if you're wondering why some stages have captions, that's why!

Here are a couple of videos:

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jan 3, 2018 at 10:41am PST

A post shared by Alison Mutton (@alene.art) on Jan 5, 2018 at 11:38am PST

(there's a video hiding behind this IG post - swipe sideways or click the little arrow)

This was the first time I'd ever used the blue tape I see people using. It worked quite well. Previous tapes have always come unstuck and my paper has warped anyway. 

Winsor and Newton watercolour, Prismacolor coloured pencils, FW Acrylic Artists Ink and Copic Opaque White on Moleskine watercolour paper. I'm not entirely sure how long it took me. About 11-15 hours, I think.