the one...

all week long, i had been unusually excited about practicing watercolors on the weekend. maybe because i am finally beginning to accept the fact that i just might love watercolors - for a long time.

for most of the art i do, these were either entirely made using dry pencils, or a mixed media, which included dry medium. i never really get to know watercolors that much except for a certain period in childhood when i would occasionally watercolor my self-drawn tiny fairy-tale and fable books (grade school) and comics (high-school).

during the week days of sewing, i was planning as to what i would sketch that will make me adventurous with water coloring. I thought first of people's faces, as these are one of my fave subjects. but i realized, i have been doing it, albeit not as good as i intend them to be. but na.. it has to be something different. something that i have not done before. 

botanicals! maybe flowers would do it, or vegetables. but na... it felt too safe for some reason? i don't even know how to explain why i was thinking it that way. maybe because i had been painting flowers as a child, too... maybe next time, hydrangeas! 

then i thought why bother picking complicated images? why not just create waves and waves and different shapes to fill an entire page, ready for water coloring? like a doodle, yeah? but, somehow i thought, it felt juvenile. forgive my immature reasons but i guess, i must have done too many doodles in the past too.

and then i remember clipping some magazine images that i thought would be nice watercolor practice images. dug them out from some forgotten folder and hooray! it was love at first, eeep, second sight! i chose a perfume picture that shows both lightest and darkest of it. 

i then started with a not-so-quick study of it:

my study on the left

of course it was way too problematic. 

first, my son's comments:

1. my scale and proportions were off - guilty.

2. the fonts were off - guilty (since it was a study, there's no reason to make it look like the real thing, but I know i should have not been lazy enough about the scale and proportions.

then as i review my work, in addition to my son's points,  i noticed:

3. awkward upper reflections of bottle's print

4. awkward perspective

5. colors not right

6. i didn't make most colors dark enough

7. not much white on supposed white areas

8. waves not drawn with respect to shadows/reflections to the bottle

so i tried correcting in my final sketch some of the flaws that we noticed:

lunch break snap

 

Left to right: a clipping from a magazine ad, my final sketch

still, despite not being able to solve all the problems listed, i think the final sketch is an improvement to the study. 

part of the problem why some items weren't executed in the final sketch is that i only pointed out my problems from an actual eye's perspective. I only added items 5-8 now as i write this post, after seeing the snapshot on the monitor. 

so i missed the following supposed corrections: 

5. colors not right - bottle cap that's supposed to be a dark kind of sand, the supposed reddish brown color isn't red enough, 

6. i didn't make most colors dark enough - i was so struggling to mix the darkest reddish brown that i think i became lazy again and got contented with what i mixed despite knowing that any color i see on the mixing pan will be lighter on the paper

7. not much white on supposed white areas, too much white on supposed dark areas 

8. waves not drawn with respect to shadows/reflections to the bottle

9.the details looked too overworked - so i resolve in the future projects to just keep it cool =P

10. and many others that i failed to see... 

despite having learned in the past that it's easier to spot problems in a sketch from a photo, i still was my old lazy self and skipped that crucial step. this has to change if i want to improve.

and so yeah, additional point to consider there. 

but before i go, i think it will be helpful to list down what i thought made this sketch better than the study.

- i like how i made the effort to stylize the font to near correctness (compared to the study)

- i like how i braved into mixing colors (i used 5 mixes basically then gradually added greens and reds and purples to darken them up for some semi-detail work

- i love that gray parts at the near-bottom sides of the bottle transitioning to black

- i discovered that i can use the no.10 flat brush for making skinny lines instead of the wobbly no.0 round brush.. thus i was able to kind of outline the bottle nicely (compared to the study)

- i loved that i somehow developed some formula on how to make a color darker without using black

- it's actually fascinating to analyze the basic colors that compose a certain color

- it can really be hard to mix your own darkest colors so i need more patience

- i enjoyed dragging colors to create the faded effects

- i enjoyed this project a lot that i am already thinking of what to sketch next time!

So yeah, that was it! And despite the quality of that final sketch, it felt liberating! 

i think i'm gonna be loving watercolors again!