Returning to My Roots

At the urging of my good friend Nick Meglin, I am returning to traditional watercolor in my illustration work. I'll still do digital where digital works best. But there's just nothing like the feel of real brush to paper. For this one, I output my rough pencil sketch to watercolor paper as a light sepia line. That gives me a light image upon which to paint. The Epson inks are soybean based, and are fairly water resistant, so there's no muddying of the color by adding paint to the surface. Type and corrections are done digitally, but the original is pristine and a nice piece of art to archive in itself. So now I have good watercolor originals to donate to charities once again!

all images copyright J.Pittman, 2010

Rough sketch in sepia, ready to color.

Detail

Commencing the Finished Art

I'm doing a new Plant Delights Nursery catalog cover this week. When starting the finished art, I like to do one area a little more finished, like the entire cover will be, to set the tone for where I'm going. This portion shows my sepia line sketch, lightened, so I can paint right over it.

I like this approach better than drawing the finished line work right away, because it helps the illustration look more like a watercolor painting rather than a line drawing that has been colored.

For the rest of the illustration, I'll apply light washes overall and gradually build the entire scene up to the level of finish of the completed face. Ideally, that will require less line work as a lot of the outlines will be defined by the washes.