Canson Paper and Schmincke Watercolour Sketches!

Schmincke, Canson, Princeton!

Hi all!

Unfortunately I was a bit hard-pressed for time in delivering this tutorial because I am under the pump with my final semester at University, so I will hopefully deliver another tutorial on drawing proportions very soon. However, in the meanwhile, I thought I could share with you some of the paintings and sketches I have created using Canson papers and Schmincke Horadam Aquarell Watercolour Paints.

I bought these gorgeous paints a while back and have fallen in love with watercolour all over again. I bought a set of 24 1/2 pans and have had so much fun with them.

The Schmincke watercolours have such a strong pigment and make painting and using the paints so much easier. You know those paints that you've had in the past where you have laden your brush with paint, only to find within a few strokes it's practically all gone? This is the exception, I remember when I first tried them and I touched my wet brush ever so lightly onto the paint and then used it and the colour was amazing! It also lasted so long and this works out in your favor, for not only does it save time and makes working more efficient, but you end up using much less paint because you don't need so much onto your brush.

Tip: Wet the paint brush, rather than wetting the pan, this way you can keep your paints much cleaner.

 Here are some examples of the more involved paintings I've done using these paints:

Truth

 

 Life

 Way

Tip: When building up a painting like this in layers, start with a wash that covers your whole background, so you aren't left with noticeable white spaces.

 The Glass Slipper

Tip: I built this painting up from the lightest colours to the darkest.

A Psychedelic Forrest

~

This is mainly what I use in conjunction with the Schmincke Paints:

Canson Watercolour Paper: This one is a Medium, 185 gsm. I use both the A3 and A4 sizes. I have been using this paper since I started painting when I was 14, I used to save up my pocket money for buying pads of paper!

Princeton brushes, I have a number of sets that I've used which work really well and are affordable too!

Now here is a bit more about the paints:

You receive this super cute colour testing page where you can use your colours and then refer back to it when selecting colours.

The box mine came in, I nursed it preciously home.

Inside the box!

This is what my paints look like now after the dozens of paintings I've used them for!

It appears I am fond of the green colour.

Tip: If you want to keep reusing the same colour mix that you've created, mix the colours on either a plastic or metal surface (like this one) so it doesn't dry so quickly and can very easily be re-hydrated. If you use paper, it just absorbs the paint and dries out super easily. Especially with the pan sets opposed to the tubes of paint.

Some more sketches:

This really shows off the vibrancy of the paints.

 You can see a bit of the bleed effect in the tulips where I overlapped the red onto the yellow.

 This really shows off the nature of the paint. I just wet a part of the paper and transferred paint into the patch and then nudged it with the brush.

 Using a slightly dry-brush technique to achieve this textures.

Tip: Using a brush with a flat/square tip can give you these beautiful marks shown above. Simply wet the brush but then only touch the very tip with the paint and drag it in short succession.

 This was actually the very first thing I painted with the watercolours as a test, was a lot of fun!

Mixing the paint with other mediums.

I hope you have learned a little and hopefully been inspired!

~

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_________________________

Please send us your work or anything that you create! Thanks for watching!

 

Natalie Wyatt

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Basics: Drawing Proportions - 1# Lines

Basics: Drawing Proportions - 1# Lines

 By Natalie Wyatt

For the next few tutorials, I thought it may be beneficial to go through the different ways you can draw proportions and explore a number of mediums in the process. Today I will show you how I use lines to free-hand draw this pencil drawing of Poldark... I may be a tad obsessed with the show!

Materials:

- B and 4B Pencil

- Eraser

- Canson CA Grain Paper

- Baking Paper/Tracing Paper

This is the main technique I use when drawing and although it can be a tad tricky at the beginning, it can prove to be a wonderful method that produces great results with practice.

Essentially, you use guide lines to line up the features of the drawing so you understand where the intersection points should be.

 This drawing by Diane Dobson-Barton is an example of the type of techniques I'll be employing in this tutorial. This shows you how the facial features intersect and the distance between them all.

This is the reference image that I used, I flipped it for this drawing though.

This was my set up, you can either print out your reference, or use the computer like I did, which allows you to draw over the top of the image on separate layers which prevents your reference from being wrecked.

I always start with the eyes. Try to avoid doing the face shape first because if the shape is wrong, every feature will be wrong. Whereas with the eye, you can start with a small section and get that right and then every section afterwards will also be correct. I did the majority of this drawing with the B pencil.

Once I had drawn the eye, I drew over my reference to figure out the distance from the eye to the eyebrow. From the edge of the eyebrow back to the eyelid was the same distance measured by the second line, this way I could use the distance of the part I'd already drawn to measure the line.

So I drew my eyebrow and shaded the rest of the eye.

Now to figure out the next eye, I drew a line across the eyeballs so I could understand what fell below and was above the line. I saw that the left eye is mainly above the line, which is the same height as my right eye. I also broke the line into thirds and noticed that the distance between both eyes was the width of the right eye. So you can essentially imagine a third eye fitting perfectly in the gap between the two.

I drew out the guide lines and penciled out my left eye. It may be a little complicated how I'm explaining this, but you can draw lines however you want. All you are essentially wanting to do is use lines to know where things line up. E.g. the iris in the eye lines up with the corner of the lip etc,.

I shaded in the remainder of the eye.

Now I sought to find the position of the nose, using the height of the eye and eyebrow as a measurement, I figured out that the base of the nose is two of those distances. I then drew lines to know where the nose tip/base/side of face lined up with the eyes.

The further along you go in the drawing, the easier it becomes. It's like Soduku, the more numbers (drawn features) that you have, the easier it is to figure out the rest.

Can you smell that? Cause Ross Poldark sure can now!

 

Now, I drew the hat line. I drew a line from the corner of the hat to the side burn on his right cheek. And then I drew another line with its middle being the highest point of the hat line. This helped me to understand the curve of the hat and where the highest point was.

Took this into the drawing.

A bit of shading.

For the mouth, I drew lines from corner to corner and lined then up with the eyes. I then drew lines along the middle of the mouth and base of the nose and figured out the equivalent above using the nose I'd already drawn. 

I hope at least some of this is making sense ha-ha!

Now I was able to shade it in.

For the jaw, I lined up the bottom of the nose and the middle of the mouth with the jaw line. Then I created another line for the bottom of the jaw so I would know that the size is larger than the gap between his nose and mouth. I also used other lines to help me with the side burn.

Ta-da!

Shading is fun now! And the hardest part of the whole drawing is done. As much as it is important that the other features are right, it doesn't matter so much with clothes and hair because they are not consistent like facial features.

Now I used my jaw, nose and eye as guides to help plan the drawing of the ear.

Ear and the beginnings of hair.

When shading, it's important to shade with the shape of the face, but sometimes I'll cross-hatch to give it a rougher look.

At this point, there's a lot of grey-lead on the page, so I employ my favourite art tip, using baking paper. You can tear a piece and put it under your hand so you don't get your hand oils on the page or smudge the graphite. This is a life saver!

Now this looks crazy, but you can do it any way that suits you. You should see by observing my lines that I was interested in the points where the shape changes direction or comes to an extreme point. Imagine running your finger along those lines and seeing where they intersect.

Some of the hat couldn't fit on the page, but that's fine! I also drew the hair on the side of the head.

Shading in the hair.

I often roughly shade the whole object and then build up layers.

 This was done still with the B pencil, but I'll add more depth later.

Again, this looks complicated, but if you look at each of the peaks of his clothing, I've just drawn lines that intersect with some main element on the face, so I can line them up. I also drew a line along the jaw so I can determine the height distance of the different clothes.

Now put into practice.

Shading the neck.

Now I shaded the rest of the clothes, I used cross hatching to give it a gradual fade-out look. I also rushed the clothes a bit so they've a bit hap-hazard, but you get the picture!

The final step when shading a portrait is very important. And that is to get a darker pencil (4B), sharpen it to a fine point and then observing your reference, shade over the darkest parts of the drawing. Add fine details, thicken lines, add volume etc; and it makes such a difference.

(Here is a small .gif which shows the difference between the last two stages.

 Hope you learned something!

~

Find us on Facebook:

Crafty Crusaders:

Pebeo Australia:

Canson Australia:

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Instagram: @mepxymarkers

_________________________

Please send us your work or anything that you create! Thanks for watching!

 

Natalie Wyatt

Natalie's Facebook Page