About
In this painting demo, I'll show you how to use watercolors and acrylics to create something sort of like this beet-crowned Spindly.
The thing I love the most about combining watercolor and acrylic paint is that it is so completely forgiving. Mistakes in shading can be erased with water or painted over with a thin glaze of acrylics. I use FolkArt brand because it's got more grit in it and gives more of a tooth for the watercolor to grab onto. Bizarrely, this technique doesn't work well on anything but canvas. I've tried it on many other supports with varying degrees of success, but I hope you'll post your successes if you find something that works fabulously!
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You Will Need
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Step 1I start out light and apply acrylic paint with a waterbrush. Waterbrushes have water in the handle and a sponge above the brush that feeds water into the bristles as you paint. I like using waterbrushes for application of both acrylics and watercolors as they give me greater control over the amount of paint I'm laying down. Once that's done, take a break, walk the dog, bake a pie, work on another piece of art, do something that will keep you from staring at your canvas trying to will it to dry with your mind.
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Step 2Use watercolors for the shadows in the face. I use a lot of purples and greens in this process. She looks like some freaky mutant. Let's move onto the next step quick! (after the watercolor dries. Stupid paint).
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Step 3Using "vintage white" (sort of a bone color) and a waterbrush, smooth out those layers of watercolor until she's shaded and doesn't look quite so much like something that should be shambling around in a George Romero movie.
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Step 4For hair, I slop on full-strength acrylic with a cheapo brush and usually completely ignore my charcoal sketch lines. That's completely okay, rub them with a wet brush and they disappear completely!
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Step 5Using watercolors again, give her hair some shading and work some more deeper shades back into her face
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Step 6Using white acrylic (wicker white this time, a much brighter white), work in highlights and give her hair some dimension. This is usually when I add teeth and the "shines" to her eyes.
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Step 7This is when I decided she needed a beet crown. With burgundy acrylic, I dabbed on some random beet-shaped blobs and then used "thicket" (dark green) for the shadows. I do a lot of shading with complementary colors as it give greater depth and dimension to your work. That almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about, right? Awesome. I do the watercolor treatment on dark colors too, it's just harder to see until you....
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Step 8ADD WHITE! Ta-daaa!! At this point I worked some more darks into her hair, added a wash of white to the beets and then blobs of dark green watercolor for the deeper shadows. I also used random spots and piles of white to bring the crown and hair together into one cohesive mass.
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Step 9Finally, I mixed a deep turquoise acrylic 1:1 with water and splattered the entire canvas with a toothbrush. Messy! Fun! The final scanned version is at the top of this post.
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