Hello everyone,
Melinda here today. I’m new to digis and was super excited to color some of Alex’s amazing illustrations as I am a huge fan of her work (swoon).
I just knew I had to watercolor this bird with the pretty flower, but I had to do some problem solving because my printer doesn’t have watercolor friendly ink. I had some graphite paper around that I knew I could use that to achieve a no line look.
I started by taking a piece of Arches watercolor paper and laying a piece of graphite paper down. Next I taped the cute bird image I had printed off on top of the graphite paper. I traced around the outline of the image.
You can leave out parts like the floral, or the necklace like I did. I wanted this bird to have non traditional colors and also wanted to try out some new watercolors.
I chose, Quinacridone Coral, Quinacridone Magenta and Quinacridone Violet for the belly and just kind of randomly dabbed colors around. After the belly was dry I used Indigo for the wing and tail feathers. After the whole piece was dry I added darker detail for the wing and tail feathers. For the body of the bird I used the negative painting technique to add a feathered look.
Final details were the eye, make sure to leave a bit of white for the glare or add it later with a white gel pen. I used a little yellow and brown for the beak and last but not least I painted that pretty floral on the birds head using the magenta and violet colors.
Melinda
