Drawing Process and a Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog!

I decided not to do a separate intro post, but if you'd like to know a little bit about me head over to the About page. Instead I thought what better way to start than to show my drawing process of the little illustrated me I drew for the about page.

I did a quick sketch to see what angle, hairstyle and outfit I'd like for the drawing. I suddenly forgot how to draw a face and I realised I drew the head way too large. So I drew a bunch of floating heads to find the right face. I settled on the one in the bottom right corner, so I coloured it in.

I then made a proper sketch, but I (unsurprisingly) started too low down and the feet didn't fit in, so I had to retrace it using my lightbox, a.k.a a window. I ended up with a nice clean sketch.

Then it was watercolour time. I am currently using a Winsor & Newton cotman water colours sketcher's pocket box. Which is basically just a basic wee travel watercolour set, but the paint is great quality. I started with a thin layer of very diluted paint, waited for it to dry before I did another layer, and then another layer, and another layer and so on to create shadows and highlights, until I was happy with the colours.

Layer 1

Layers 2 & 3

Layer 4 and onwards

When all that was done I made my special mix of Winsor & Newton peat brown ink and generic Koh-I-Noor black ink in a super professional mixing dish (a juice bottle cap). I used it to add the outline and some detail. I used white acrylic paint and coloured pencils to finish it off.

I ended up with a picture like this:

If you scroll back to the top you'll see that I used the original sketch without the feet to scribble my colour palette as well as to write out: "Oh hey there!". I still need a lot of practice...

I spent A LOT of time on this.I just wanted to make it good considering it was going to be a permanent part of the blog. Hopefully soon I'll improve and think it's totally crap and want to redraw it, but for now, I like it.

Okay, bye!