Chewing Pencils

When I first began to explore using Painter, developing my style to include watercolour, I realised quite quickly that I knew nothing about watercolour technique. A trip to the local art store quickly fixed that and I began to learn more about how watercolour worked. Although I was only using a digital version of the media, I still found the art book helped me get more out of the software and I was far happier with the results.

For my Valentine’s Day cartoon, I decided to use the watercolour brushes to give it a more ‘natural’ look. But before adding any colour, I needed to ink my pencil draft. Painter allows you to adjust the values used for speed and pressure when using a drawing tablet, so with those set to suit my style, I began to ink the draft.

The process was simple. I firstly created a second layer on which the black outline would be drawn. When finished, I would simply delete the underlying pencil draft and replace it with a blank canvas to which I would add the colour.

The screen shot below gives a close up of the outline added to the Reaper. I’m using the pens brush set at ten point.

With the outline added to the rest of the cartoon,I thought it best to slightly reposition Cupid and Reaper to allow more room for the speech balloon. 

With the outline in place, it was time for the pencil draft to be trashed! The scanned pencil image formed the canvas layer (see the layer names to the right of the screen shot) which I simply deleted and replaced with a new, white canvas.

Because the watercolour stuff is still quite new for me, I find it lots of fun. I’m probably over doing it a bit and could make more use of empty space, but for now I’ll just enjoy the ride! Anyway, I added the sky first with fairly broad strokes and a large brush nib. There’s no need to worry too much about going over the lines as any colour added later simply covers over what’s underneath. Plus a little bit of ‘bleed’ helps give it more of a natural feel.

The bushes and the ground were done next. Note that I haven’t tried to avoid the flowers or sign at all - the finer colouring in the next stage will cover these ‘errors’.

In the next part of the tutorial, I’ll add the final detail and use a different software package to add the text.