“Watercolour Wonder” with Nina Rycroft

Color Theory Fun

We mixed Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors using watercolor. I went off the beaten path and chose Opera Pink as my primary “red.” For my other primaries, I used Nickel Azo and Slate Blue. I used to do these exercises in college and enjoyed revisiting them. I played with alternative primary shades; it was such a cheerful palette.

Object Sketch & Planning

This was fun! We listed the objects we could glean from Lewis Carroll’s excerpt, then sketched them in our unique way:

HISTORICAL REFERENCE

I love history, so I enjoyed researching the way children dressed in the late 19th Century. This part of the course brought in traditional drawing skills. Nina provided worksheets showing proportions by age and simple shapes to help create character maps.

GESTURE

To help us loosen up, we did a great gesture exercise using water-soluble pencils and watercolor with a limited palette. Then applied this to our character of choice.

DESIGNING DIFFERENT CHARACTERS

There are so many characters to choose from, so I focused mainly on Alice and the Queen Of Hearts. I sprinkled in a few of the other characters for fun, such as the Cheshire Cat, rabbit, and King. Nina gave great feedback on her Facebook Private Group as well as in Live sessions which were very helpful.

DESIGNING

We continued playing with the simple shapes of characters and then placed them in a storytelling design on a playing card. This was such a brilliant idea by Nina! I loved how it played into the theme of Alice In Wonderland, but also allowed us to work small enough to explore a wide variety of characters.

PAINTING IN WATERCOLOR

Personally, I focused on painting techniques this week on different textured boards. Every student had their own pace in this class and different areas they wished to focus on. I enjoyed trying different approaches to watercolor and adding colored pencil too. My focus was to keep things loose.

COMPUTER CLEANUP

I would scan my illustrations into Photoshop and clean up any areas on the painting that needed it. I kept this minimal, though, because I’m a big fan of seeing the raw art materials in the final. This was not a requirement of the course, just something I chose to do.

COMPOSITION

Nina reviewed many different composition and design rules. I sketched out three double-page spreads for ideas on the same scene. I had great feedback from Nina. I ended up deciding on completing a half-page illustration due to time constraints. Here is a sketch, value study, color study and final.

PLANNING AND PREPARATION

I ended up with a vertical layout using a pre-made diagram I created on semi-transparent marker paper. This way it was easy to transfer crop marks and bleed marks onto my final board. I also found that transferring my final drawing to the board was best if I used the pencil shading method on the back side of my drawing. I plan to post a video of this on my YOUTUBE channel next week.