Knight on White Horse - 1st Installment

Today I started a painting which will probably take several hours to complete. I decided to do about 30 minutes each day and post the installments or stages as the painting develops. Today I blocked out the principal figures of the painting. This is watercolor washes on 7x10 inch watercolor paper. It took about 30 minutes to get to this stage. I'm going to use a combination of watercolor and gouache, which is highly refined tempera paint. Both work well together and are water soluble. The watercolor is great for transparent washes and the gouache can be applied both transparently in thin washes or more thickly in opaque strokes. Many illustrators used to use gouache up until the digital age.

Young Woman-001 (watercolor)

I'm still struggling with getting the right values when I paint with watercolors. Today I tried to paint "beefier" and boosts those lights and darks. This is a sketch of a young woman. It is watercolor on paper - no pencil this time. And it took about 30 minutes to do.

Knight on Horseback (watercolor)

Today I used a soft dark graphite pencil to add details and dark accents after I laid in my watercolor washes. I want to make my watercolors more punchy and have more dynamic range, but I don't think this is the best way to do that. Tomorrow I'm going back to the drawin' board and will work with all watercolor paint. I plan on continuing with the watercolor sketches for at least another month or so.

Watercolor caricature of Brian Froud

Today I was just fooling around with watercolors and I decided to attempt a caricature of an artist I admire. I think it might have been too ambitious but I slogged through it anyway. I'm really not good enough yet at watercolors to do caricatures at the same speed and quality I was doing them with the wacom digital drawing tablet. This is watercolor on heavy paper. It took about 40 minutes to paint.

Pointy Eared Monster watercolor doodle

Today I was mostly just goofing around. I'm more interested in getting a better video picture and working out how to best compress the time lapse videos I'm going to be making in the future from real paintings instead of digital ones. Today's subject was out of my head. I commonly call that a "brain phart". It took a bit over 15 minutes to sketch and it is watercolor on paper.

watercolor wash of Walt Disney at Desk

Here is a quick sketch I made to test my webcam set up and see if I can make videos of me painting a real painting. It works! This is the first speedpaint video I've made of a non digital painting and it is also the 200th video I've posted to www.YouTube.com. This is a simple monochromatic watercolor wash on paper. It took about ten minutes to paint/sketch.

Caricature of a young Walt Disney

Today I tried videoing myself painting a watercolor and it all failed. My computer crashed 15 minutes into the sketch. So I stopped and will try again tomorrow. I find painting with the camera set up to be a bit strange and hard to get used to. I need to build a structure that can support the camera in a better place that is more out of my own personal space. This is the first of a new series of daily paintings. I am going to start doing conventional artwork like watercolors and oils for my daily sketches. This was watercolor on paper and it took about 15 min. to paint.