Process Stuff - Lumberjack Watercolor

So, yeah. I did this thing...

...which I'm pretty much in love with.

I heart this guy, from his giant ax to his tiny, T-Rex arms. But did I always love him? Oh, no. The process from start to finish was a little rougher.


I knew what kind of shape I wanted, but I'd never done something so anatomically incorrect (at least not on purpose), so I futzed around with my sketchbook for a while, being tentative and anxious for the better part of an hour until I felt like I had a basic shape and pose that I liked.

Then I fleshed it out slowly, doing light pencils here and there until I had something that was still rough, but I could imagine turning into something polished.

You can kind of see hints of the final product, but it still needed a bit of refinement. And, you know, a background and and colors and stuff.

At this point, I put everything on my gigantic, homemade lightbox and did a final pencil on watercolor paper.

I was still making little changes here and there, just tightening things up or trying new ideas. This is when my white plastic eraser is my best friend. Seriously, if you don't have one, get one. It erases 99% of pencil marks without killing your paper, which is really important if you like watercolors but prefer to do loose pencils.

Anyway, when I finished my pencil lines, it was time to start laying down colors...

Why yes, that IS a dinosaur figurine on my desk! I keep it around as a counter-weight when I lightbox one notebook with another. Also, because... dinosaurs, dude.

As you can see, I'm just laying down tones here. The picture is starting to take shape, but it still seems really nebulous and I was starting to get nervous about how things would turn out.

No joke, I was almost ready to abandon the picture at this point. Looking at it now, I realize the colors didn't look so bad at this stage. I guess I was just too wrapped up in the project to be objective. Luckily, by this time I had spent too much time working on the picture to turn back now, so on I went.

I'd originally intended to make this a lineless picture, but... ah, yeah. That wasn't going to work out. It just looked too mushy.

So, I brought out the brown ink and laid down some lines...

Yes. Oh, yes. That was exactly what it needed.

Relieved, I finished up the rest of the linework and... La voila!

It's weird, really, but I'm finally getting to a point where I can look at something I've done and NOT immediately pick out five things that I should have done differently. Maybe that's hubris, or maybe that's progress.

Either way, I drew a lumberjack. :)