Current Work in Progress

Iron Man - Watercolour Painting

Well here is my first running WIP piece. I decided I'd had enough drawing for a bit so thought I would dig out my watercolours again. Although not the most obvious choice for watercolour I really wanted to pain the new Iron Man from the upcoming movie. I'm a huge Marvel comic fan anyway so this was always going to be fun to do.

This is actually my second attempt at the painting, I originally started it on some cheap watercolour board I had bought rather than strectch some paper. Big mistake!!! As soon as I used much water on the board or rubbed it too hard with the bruch the surface of the paper began to lift and roughen. So after getting about halfway through I gave up and started again on some quality watercolour paper.

The following stages have all been done today while I was at Tynemouth market.

I should have taken an earlier photo, but I forgot so here it is after I have finished drawing out the basic pencil linework, which is done as light as possible so as not to show though the paint and make them easy to erase if needed. Actually to make sure the paper stays as clean as possible I draw the linework out on a seperate sheet of paper then trace it onto my final piece of stretched watercolour paper.

I don't use any overly expensive watercolours infact I am still using an old set of Daler-Rowney solid watercolour cakes that I have had for years. My watercolour technique is a bit slow as I tend to build colour up gradually with multiple layers of light washes. Mainly because I am always a bit nervous of slapping thick dark watercolour on incase I make a mistake with it or get the colour a bit wrong.

Just layering on washes of red, mixing in blue and a little black for the shadows. Usually try not to use too much black if possible as it tends to deaden the colours a bit. (Plus I always remember back at school my art teacher wouldn't even let us use black, it was banned from the class.)

These images were taken at various stages throughout painting progress as I started building up the colour and adding in detail. The first image below shows the start of the background, working wet into wet letting the paint bleed across the paper and see what patterns it makes, hopefully nice ones..

To add finishing touches to the picture I worked on top of the watercolors with Prismacolour coloured pencils to add some extra contrast and details.