Chewing Pencils

I’ve recently started to experiment with some changes to my style - not because it is bad or because I’m getting negative feedback. My real motivation has simply been boredom! I want to try something new and see if I can make money out of it.

A style of cartooning that I have admired for a long time is one which uses water colour and wash to achieve great looking shadows and moods. But rather than spend lots of money on materials for a technique I might be no good at, I’ve decided to try and keep it 100% digital.

My software has several different water colour brushes that I can use, plus an old version of Painter Classic on my computer can do everything I could possibly want ‘natural media’ wise aswell. I have everything I need except one thing…

I can’t paint using water colour. I have no idea were to start or what to do. My software manuals tell me how to access the tools that I need in the different menu options, but they don’t tell me how to use them creatively. I can (and do) experiment for hours to try and achieve the look I’m after, but at the end of the day I wallow in my water colour ignorance.

But, there is help available. Obviously I could go to an art class, but again, this would mean buying the materials. A better option for me has been to purchase a basic ‘How to Water Colour’ book that outlines the tips and techniques used by the pro’s and includes some basic exercises to get familiar with the medium. Of course, the book assumes I’m using natural media, but there is no reason why the exercises/tutorials can’t be used with digital water colour. If your software is powerful enough, you can mimick everything natural water colour can do without the mess or clean up afterwards.

So on my bookshelf now, I have a growing number of art books that seemingly have nothing to do with cartooning, and even less with computer software. But these books have become another important tool in my kit - time will tell how good an investment they have been!