I get asked about my process quite a bit, so I thought it’d be fun to give you guys a quick glimpse into how I put one of my watercolors together. This works out nicely, as my buyer asked for me to do so with this specific piece! Just about every person who commissions a piece from me has a cool personal story about why this means so much to them, and that’s a big reason why I love doing these!
I always start out with very tight pencils, as the likenesses are very important. I tend to always mix ink with my watercolors, due to my roots in making comic books, so the tight pencils come in handy at the end of the process.
I normally start with the background. What I’ll do is apply just water to that area, then drop in heavily-pigmented paint, of two or more colors and just let them mix how they want to. I like to do things specific to a media if I’m working with it, and this is one of those things that watercolors do really well.
I’ll then add in a flat base color for the figures. This needs to be a fairly light hue due to the way watercolors work, where you want to build your layers from light to dark, the opposite way from say acrylics or oils. Again, one of those peculiarities of watercolors that make them a fun challenge to work with. For this stage, I’ll normally use a watered-down yellow orange or a tan.
Next I build up the tones with a less watered-down layer of the same color, then add in another color like a brown or a blue for the shadows, or even a combination of the two, depending on the composition.
Now it’s time to start the inks. For the way my brain works, I’ll normally work one figure at a time, and work from the foreground to the background. I don’t have any background to ink in this piece, so I start with the figure on the left, Shawn, and then work my way over to Nash on the right. My inking style is heavily influenced by comic book artists like Kelley Jones and Sean Phillips, guys who work a lot with positive and negative space and chunky blacks to define a composition.
And here’s the final piece! I get asked a lot about how long something took to make, and the answer is always, “As long as it takes.” Some go easy, some require more brainpower, and every one of them is informed by the piece I did before. I learn from every painting I do and apply that to the next piece, or get an idea to then expand upon the next time around.
