blue avian created by ruaidri
Description

Colour!

Ah, it's nice to have some watercolour paper again! I was really starting to miss colouring.

So, story time. I made the 20-ish minute drive to the nearest art store to grab some more watercolour paper since the nearby walmart no longer has any. it's a pretty tiny art store though and they didn't have any of the books or pads of paper. They did however have some of the big full sized sheets. Having no other choice, I grabbed a couple of those. Man, that stuff is pricey! But it works so so much better than the cheapo walmart paper. I expected it would, and was not disappointed.

Not wanting to jump right into full sized picture drawing and potentially waste a lot of the paper and money (basically it boils down to a little over six dollars for 4 sheets at 8.5 by 11), I'm starting by cutting some small, 4x5 inch cards to test out the paper with. That's why this scan is as small as it is, I don't want you seeing a full sized image and thinking the texture is crazy powerful when it's really not, it's just more noticable simply because the overall picture is smaller than normal.

I can't believe this worked though! Believe it or not, there's no inking in this picture at any point. Normally I ink both before and after colouring. This time I painted right on top of the pencil sketch, and for the outlines I instead used black paint and a fine brush. It's got a lot of potential. You have a huge amount of control over your line work this way- both thickness and value. However, with greater amounts of control comes a greater requirement for control, so it's going to take some practice to get the shakes and stutters out. Not bad for a first shot, though!

Overall, fairly pleased with the result so far. I'm going to stick to just these small cards for a while before jumping into full pictures I think, but for a first go at such a radically different method- new paper, new paints, new outline style- I'm pretty happy.

But what do you folks think? It's just a doodle, but let me know your thoughts!

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