Watercolor & Gouache D&D Commission!

WHOOOO BOY this one took WAY longer than I intended it to! But the person who commisioned it has been waiting FOREVER for this, so I was happy to put in the extra effort. Plus, I was basically experimenting while I went, so it doubled as practice. :)

One of those experiments was THE PAPER, which as you may notice from the photos WARPED LIKE MAD so I will stop using it for commissions! It's from a pad of Canson XL Watercolor Paper, which is fun for quick sketches and figure drawing, but uhh NOT RECOMMENDED for projects you're gonna get wet more than once!

Jial'dor is a goliath (I'm assuming ranger, because she has a companion animal and that's exactly why I decided to be a ranger for our own D&D campaign A GNOME RANGER, in case you were interested) who's 7'7" and uses a double scimitar which was definitely a new vocabulary word for me. Her companion animal is a big spectral cat, the species of which she gave me free rein, so I picked a panther.

The scene I picked was inspired by afternoon activities with Smudge, who likes to chase the reflection of my phone when I take a snack break downstairs.

After I got a sketch I liked (which, it turned out, was greatly benefited by googling images of the Pink Panther), I used a trick Lucy Knisely  shared the other day: I took a photo (or scan) of the sketch, made it high contrast black-and-white in Photoshop on a file the same size as my paper, FLIPPED the image horizontally, and printed this BACKWARDS image on the back of my watercolor paper. I then flipped the paper over to the front, placed it on my light table (you can use a window during the day) so I could see the b&w print from the other side, and lightly traced the print. 

I'm not sure you realize just how BRILLIANT this is. A LOT of artists complain about how the expression and energy that we put into our sketches can never quite be translated into the final piece. This at least gets me a little bit closer to that gestural energy I often find in my initial sketch, because if nothing else, the LAYOUT of the finished piece will be exactly the same as it was in the sketch.

Alright, enough gushing about this new process that I'll be using for the rest of my life.

Lately I've been outlining my watercolor sketches with colored pencil, to avoid that muddy graphite line that I'd otherwise get with a lead pencil. This also gets me one step closer to shutting off my brain and just enjoying the process of putting paint on paper, because I'm picking the color scheme as I "ink" with the colored pencils. 

I'll be mindful to use the same color to outline several different shapes in the piece in order to limit my palette and provide some color unity within the piece; for example, if I know the characters are going to be bluish and the final piece will be a sort of analogous color scheme (yellow-green, green, blue, blue-violet), I'll try to make any arbitrary colors (the hair, the trees, the mountains, etc.) fit within that scheme by outlining them with just one or two colors that suit that scheme; in this case, violet. 

Okay, so then I laid down my watercolor... and realized that this paper isn't gonna cut it. It absorbs the paint so fast that the moment I try to continue filling a large shape of one color, wherever I'd left off is already permanently recorded by a  dark telling edge, not unlike the permanence of our president's most ridiculous tweets, recorded for all eternity. Moreover, if I go over the paint I've just laid down, it DARKENS the color! (See: the mountains I utterly destroyed about halfway down.) 

I almost started over, but then decided that I missed using gouache, and it couldn't hurt to get reacquainted with the medium...

... which, it turns out, I still ADORE. The mixture of pale atmospheric watercolor in the background, and the bold flat gouache in the foreground, is exactly what I was looking for! Plus, being able to fix opaque paint makes the painting process a whole lot more enjoyable. I may have said this earlier, but I feel like working in watercolor all these years has offered me a sort of "trainer" handicap; if you fuck up in watercolor, there's no going back. You'll never get the purity of that untouched or barely-touched white paper back after you've accidentally covered it. 

To me, working in opaque paint feels like cheating, and suddenly, cheating feels REALLY GOOD.

So it did indeed take me two days to complete this thing after I decided to go over the ENTIRE foreground with gouache and include every blade of grass on their little hill, but... worth it. 

Plus, look at the glow I was able to get on the cat! Compare the watercolor version to the gouache version. (One of the tricks was simply using muddied, earthy colors on everything else, as I usually do, and mixing pure from-the-tube blue and white to make the cat's saturated hue. In comparison to its suroundings, it's relatively vivid.)

I may add a few more sunbeams so that it doesn't look like whatever god exists in Jial'dor's world is actually shining down his own laser pointer at her scimitar; if I do, you'll see it later when I share the last of these commissions. :)

If you have any questions about gouache (or watercolor, colored pencil, gnome rangers, the permanence of tweets, life in general), feel free to ask them here! This process post is the sort of thing I usually only share with the $20 education level, but I wanted to share this one publicly, because it involves soooo many different elements. Plus, Lucy's trick is worth sharing with the world.

Speaking of which, Education Level Patrons, I'll be sharing the next few commissions in the same style soon, and most (perhaps all?) of them will involve gouache, because I am hooked. :)