A Poppy of a Tutorial

Every now and then, once in a blue moon, I post the progress of my work.  I've been illustrating so much for children's books lately that after painting "Day of Joy" I just needed to do another being with wings.  I still kept the youthfulness and quarky stylings that I would use in childrens' book illustration, the whole combining the two.  Now I'm rambling.

So this is "Poppy".  I like to sketch with my students during free draw at work (about 15 mins at the beginning of class we "free draw" to loosen up.  They can draw whatever they wish.)  I highly suggest it if you're not already sketching before you dive into a project.

And instead of using my mechanical pencil and moleskine sketchbook, I decided to use what they were using.  HB pencil, pearl eraser, and copy paper...I was reminded of jr. high...those were the common tools.  Sometimes it's good to go back to basics.

On the left is the sketch I did in HB pencil.  I used to just go crazy with my fashions, but have mellowed out a bit lately.  So I wanted to bring that back in.  I may have gone a bit overboard, but I'm lovin' it!  Kids loved it too.  :)  It's a great example of where practice, practice, practice will take you.  I personally love detail, I think the more detail you have the more engaging the piece becomes.  Tho I will say, negative space is just as equally important.

I took the sketch from work (which was a good size, about 5x7) and placed it on my lightbox, and taped it down (corners).  If you don't have one, get one!  They cut a lot of work time in half and now after buying a higher grade box, I don't need to ink my work anymore!  I'm a pretty messy sketcher, so the lightbox allows me to trace over my sketch with clean crisp lines.

I laid my pre-cut (cut it so that I would have enough white space around the image when I'm finished painting) Arches 140lb hot press paper on top of the sketch on the lightbox with the light on.  This way I can see exactly where my lines are going.  Taped the watercolor paper down, again...just the corners.

After I have everything I want from the sketch, I turn off the lightbox and continue working on the final line art.  I draw pretty light at first and have pretty good confidence in my line quality.  I say that not to be big headed, but that I rarely do backgrounds or major character development on separate sheets of paper.  I typically do them right on the watercolor paper without prep.

One last thing, although it's becoming more frequent, finalizing a sketch into watercolor is still pretty new to me.  I think one of the reasons why I haven't is because, I don't know about you and fellow artisans, but I always prefer the sketch over the final line art.

Why I don't just use that, I dunno.  Obessesive over clean lines...

View the first steps to adding paint now!