So lately I've been doing quite a lot of art at home and that's not just because I'm currently attending art classes. I've been in a creative block for the past few months and ever since resuming my art classes earlier in October, I feel like I've finally come out of my rut and my fingers are just itching to pick up the paintbrush or pencil again to create something on paper. So, since I've been doing a lot of watercolor paintings, I thought I would show you guys my process for creating one picture that I posted to my Instagram that I'm honestly proud of myself for being able to paint when it only took me ten minutes to do. Here's my little walk-through for you guys if you want to keep on reading!
Materials:
Left to right:
Mechanical Eraser Pen
Mechanical Pencil- 2B Refill
So if you couldn't already tell by the rough sketch I made on my page, I decided to paint the cover art for the book 'Winter' by Marissa Meyer which is the book I'm currently reading- and LOVING- and is also the fourth and final book in the series. I really love the cover art for this book in particular and I thought it would be fun to paint it as well as change up the colors a bit to make it a little more unique.
I only decided halfway through the inking that I wanted to make a process post on this painting so forgive me for not having a picture of just the sketch itself. Anyway, what I did was just blocked in most of the shapes for the fingers and the apple that the hand is holding lightly and went back in to darken the lines a bit to define them so the inking would be a lot easier. I spotted some mistakes early on in the inking like how fat I made one of the knuckles in the pinkie but don't worry, I went back and fixed it during the painting so bare with me here!
Once the inking was done I went back and erased all of the pencil marks and sketches. I also inked on some of the wrinkles where the fingers are bending when I saw that the hand looked rather flat. It surprised me a little that I was able to wing it without it turning out to look really weird which is a serendipitous success.
Next, I broke out my paints and the fun began! I honestly have no idea how to explain the way I painted the hand to begin with other than saying I just threw on a light wash of purple and continued to darken certain areas as I continued to paint. I only used one color to do all the shading for the hand to challenge myself in using as little colors as I could as practice with the medium. I was really happy to see how easily I was able to achieve that and was really loving how the colors were coming out. On some parts of the fingers where the light was supposed to be hitting it, I didn't add any color at all until the very end to keep from making the highlights too dark.
Once I finished with the hand, I started to paint the apple with a hot pink that I first laid down a light wash of then went back in to shade the darkest parts of the apple with a dryer coat of the paint. I wanted to add some of the color reflection from the fingers so I took a different shade of purple and added a tiny bit to the shadows on the apple where the fingers are holding it.
When I finished that, I moved on to painting the stem and leaf with a muted blue color that turned out pretty awesome in my mind. I didn't paint the entire leaf in the color to make it look more glassy like it appears on the actual book cover and added a darker blue to the underside of the leaf and stem to add darker shadows.
I added a few water drips to the page and also took some of the pink to create little streaks going around the apple to give it a more magical effect. You can probably see my poor attempt at fixing the pinkie by not painting the entire knuckle. It looks okay but definitely not a piece I would add to my portfolio!
I also went back in with a white Gelly Roll pen that I forgot to add into my supplies picture above to add some 'sparkles' to the apple and streaks of white to once again create a more fantastical and magic effect to the apple. I was literally just poking the page sporadically with the pen so there's no need to go into too much detail as to how I went about adding the sparkles.You probably can't see it but I went back in with a very light wash of pink paint to the highlights on the fingers to make the skin look a little less white. It was a weird contrast between the white of the highlights with the purple skin so I couldn't just leave it the way it was.
After I fixed a couple of the shadows and added more sparkles and a signature, I called this piece done! It wasn't meant to be anything amazing, just a practice run to get to know the watercolors a bit better so if you think this painting isn't all that great, trust me, I'm so not a Van Gogh or a Magritte.
I also forgot to mention that I used a mixed-media art journal from Strathmore in their 500 Series to do this painting in. I also used a paint towel that could obviously use a good cycle wash to clean off my paintbrush and get any access paint off that I didn't want while painting.
So that's it for my bookish art creation! Let me know if you guys want to see more of these on this blog since I've been getting quite a lot of requests to see more art on my Instagram. This blog is still dedicated to books and anything book-related but I think it could be fun to throw in some art every now and then to mix things up a bit. Anyhoo, enough rambling from this fangirl.
Read on bookworms! See you in the next chapter!
The clip art at the top with the splatter is taken from my foundation's logo with the center wiped out and replaced with your info. I would greatly appreciate if you would take it down since it is not your artwork and belongs to us.
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