Tutorial part 1 - the painting of a Wally

For those of you who are interested, I thought I would show how I went about painting and creating one of my Wallys from the book I'm working on at the moment, Wally & Bert BFF's.

I start with drawing the layout of the page on thin Layout paper, then trace through onto watercolour paper just one of the elements, in this case, Wally. The pic on the left is a colour rough and if you look carefully, you can see the light pencil drawing on the right.

With my Staedler water resistant black pens, I draw the outline of the character. In this instance I have used a thicker pen for most of in, with some thinner for details.

When I'm sure it's dry I rub out the pencil lines and load clean water onto the area I'm about to paint.

Flying in the face of all I was taught at school, I like to mix my paint on the paper, although I do have a rough idea of what colour I want to end up with. So in this case I have loaded some W&N bright red artists watercolour watered down only a touch.

 

And then I chase it around the paper! You never know what is going to happen as watercolour tends to have a mind of it's own (and a close relationship with the laws of physics!)

I like to add water and literally sit there watching paint dry. I remove areas with my wet brush for the highlights and add more paint to the edges and more often than not splodge drops of water onto large areas to give texture. Although it looks like he has a fatal case of smallpox, I know it will look different when dry.

While the head is still wet, I have added some W&N Brown Madder to the area around his eye and ear tip...

and some Vandyke brown. I keep going until I'm happy.

And here he is with his lower half attended to and he's now mostly dry. The intentional (ahem) mistake I made was to forget the waistcoat texture, so I did that after he dried and before I started to colour it.

I love sparkly stuff, so for the waistcoat I used Daler Rowney Pearlescent Liquid Acrylic, Macaw Green, a little splash of pinky red for the bone. As you can see, the 'smallpox' effect has disappeared and he's now ready for the next stage, which will be in part 2.