Step-by-step watercolor painting:
This summer, I was asked by a friend to create a gift for her partner, to celebrate their five-year anniversary.
This was a much looser brief than I'm used to, with a lot of room for interpretation: I had to include a special place, two or three spirit animals and some form of the number 5. It was nice to be free to translate this vision into a watercolor illustration. I'm usually held to pretty strict guidelines when illustrating for magazines or product packaging.
Here are a few pictures of this step-by-step watercolor painting process.
I always start the process with pencil lines, which I submit to the customer to confirm that I’m correctly translating their idea into images. In fact, I usually submit several simple sketches first from which to choose; I just didn’t keep them in this case. Then I ink the pencil lines with a superfine, waterproof black pen, and erase the pencil drawing.
I then start laying down light color washes to get an idea of the color values in the whole illustration.
Once the simpler elements have been watercolored, I focus on the more detailed features. The shimmery top surface of the butterfly’s wings, for instance, was achieved by adding multiple layers of ever-deepening blue. The brown, camouflage pattern on the underside of the wings was painted with a tiny, 10/0 brush, just a few hairs wide. This gives the illusion of a velvety, textured surface. For the owl, I focused less on texture, and more on the choice of rusty, brown colors.
The final illustration features a Blue Morpho butterfly, a barn owl, a wise old Northern Map turtle, a lovely local bridge and five leaves, one for each year the couple has known each other.
I rearranged the bridge’s architecture to fit the format of the illustration, and kept it relatively simple, so as not to take away from the more detailed portraits of the three animals.
Here are some pictures of the amazing patterns displayed by these beautiful creatures:
