This is a watercolor painting I did of my new friend in Church today. She didn’t know I was drawing her, and was pretty good at holding still, which any artist knows is extremely helpful to getting a likeness.
I recall struggling to understand how to add color to a drawing many years ago. And today I felt gratified that it was not such a foreign concept to me anymore.
Something that helped my brain figure this out was to use my iPad and the Procreate app to pick color samples from photographs. As I played around trying to recreate scenes, things I was seeing became more clear to my understanding.
Back in my one total year of art school I had so much fun learning to see paint colors and figure out how to mix the color I was seeing. It’s different with digital painting, and you can totally bypass that thinking stage by just picking colors straight from a reference image. But by deliberately checking to see which color of the spectrum that particular gray, or that odd brown color fell into, I felt like I was educating myself instead of “cheating”.
If drawing is the basis of painting, then painting is drawing with liquid color. I love it! I’m always excited to try again and keep learning to do something better.
