Welcome Back Watercolours | Raven and Starfire

In my many years of art, I have every now and then put down the pencils and pens and turned to paint itself. Most commonly I have worked with acrylic and watercolour paints. I liked both, but painting had never been something I was particularly gifted with, mostly due to the issue of having less control over my work.

I do have some samples of watercolour or acrylic pieces years old that I can show but for now I'm going to show you something very recent.

I went searching around my house and found an art briefcase, I used to love these things and as luck would have it, I found one with a selection of watercolours to use (although they had not been used for five years). After such a long rest, they came out of retirement and I was determined to improve my ability to control paint. Watercolour was the worst to control and wasn't particularly good for a saturated colour, I'm most probably doing something wrong. But with that in mind, I took the risk of using them again and made this picture of my favourite DC Comics heroines.

Starfire was actually created using mostly watercolour pencils, which I intend to get more of and love very much. They were also old ones that I was able to find and sadly lacked a shade of green (yet I still had the white one!) So with the exception of her metallic armour and green, Starfire was given more control because the colour was already applied.

As for Raven, I had the option to do the same by mixing three pencils together, but I only did that to mark the light on her presumably latex clothing. This was because I wanted to try using watercolour without the aid of a pencil on a larger scale than to shade Starfire's eyes. Unfortunatley this is where the lack of saturation comes through but I was still impressed with the result.

After the watercolours had dried, I brought out the felt pens to make the metallic parts shine and colour in the smaller details that my watercolour skill wouldn't have had a hope to try.

After doing this, I can see I'm clearly missing out. I've always been trying to get more and better materials, but to try new methods isn't something I always consider. This is one though that I will come back to again, I certainly want to master this technique and with a new set of watercolour pencils and watercolour palettes, things will only come out looking better with much hope!