more watercolor experiments

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I don’t know anything about water color, having never had any formal training, but I wanted to do some work that helps me learn more about ink and brush techniques, so I decided to comb through my sketchbooks and find the kind of drawings that I think are fun but would never make it to a full-fledged painting or print. I have a ton of ideas that I think are funny or cute or something, but not grandiose enough to put forth the time and energy to actually produce.

Enter ink and brush. I’ve been wanting to learn how to ink a drawing/doodle in such a way that the good illustrators do: line quality, energy, variety etc… Making a drawing look “better” through using the brushwork to give it “life.” Anyway- I thought I would just flesh out some old doodles and see what happened. They looked OK but kind of lame  without color to give them a bit of a boost.

Enter watercolors. I have brushed and mixing palletes and all that stuff anyway, so I started messing around a bit with that. I would amount it to a coloring book at this point. I don’t really know how to control the color that well, I would not run out and try to paint a landscape at this point, but over time I’m sure I will gain that control.

In the meantime it’s just kind of fun to give these old forgotten sketches a little life. And I’m a little sad I flipped my pallette – it spilled all over the happy skull! Conclusion: be more careful.