December 2012/ January 2013 Color Work

Most of December and a bit of January were spent productively generating new color pieces.  I recently realized I had a lot of Copic marker and watercolor pieces that I'd neglected to post.    These are in chronological order.

Copic llama.  Copic sketch on Strathmore Multimedia paper.  Just a little color doodle.

This piece was part of a three way art trade with Heidi.  She did the initial sketch, I tightened up the pencils, and colored it.    You can see her's here.

And here's my piece, inked with Hi Tec C and colored with Copics.

And the inked piece for Sarah Benkin, featuring one of her girls from Star Power (I palette swapped her hair, for better black balance)

This was the first time I used concentrated liquid watercolors successfully.  The night sky is a combination of yellows, reds, blues, and violets, carefully mixed to make a neutral black.  When you apply a mixture of liquid water colors to a large area, the different colors pull out, which can be a nice effect for a night sky.  I also used a very watered down shade of this mixed black in the shadows of the dress and in the snow.  The stars are a simple wax resist.

Detail:

One of my mother's Christmas presents.  She'd mentioned wanting a commission of my brother and I, and she loves my watercolor work, so I took advantage of a perfect situation (I also had no idea what to give her for her 'big' present.)  I liked the black I used in the night piece so much, I reused it here in the trike's shadow. .  It's less intense in real life, I promise.

This was done on a Strathmore watercolor block, rather than Canson Montval watercolor paper.  I like the rougher texture of the paper.

 Details:

This was just an experiment to see how liquid watercolors flow into each other when working with very wet washes.  It also happened to be New Year's Eve, so...

This overworked, muddy mess was an excuse to play around with dropping in rubbing alcohol.

 Detail:

An early shot of the effect.

Unfortunately, I haven't really had the time or ability to do color work since these, as I'm swamped with doing roughs for 7" Kara chapter 2 (21 pages instead of the 10 that make up chapter 1) and my large format printer has started to die, preventing me from printing blue lines.  Soon I'll be starting the watercolor stage of my Kara pages, and I'm excited to work with color again.