What If?…

Hey All!

The last few days I’ve been playing a little game of “What if?” with myself.

Perky Pickle

I had an idea of using grey alcohol markers prior to doing a watercolor, but I wasn’t sure if it would work. I wanted to use the markers to add shadows first, in an effort to 1. make it faster, 2. not have the grainy and/or shiny pencil in the shaded areas.

What I found out was that no, it’s not really compatible… the alcohol markers really really wanted to bleed thru the page, and even though I used a light touch and the lightest greys I had… it still didn’t quite work as I had hoped. The watercolor seemed to be much darker in those areas and it was a bit of a battle to try to blend those areas with the areas that didn’t have marker on them. I suspect that the paper itself was at capacity and couldn’t take any more medium… and so the water color tended to bleed past my inked lines and also bled thru to the other side of the page. But…

In the end I was able to get a cute doggo out of it… it was a bit of try a bit of this and try a bit of that… and technically it was an experiment of “what if I did…?”, but I think in the future I’ll try a different method to add shadows first. The funny thing is, the following day I was thinking, “why didn’t I just use grey watercolors?” “I don’t know brain”…. but I did learn that I personally did not enjoy the process of doing alcohol markers before doing watercolor.

Here’s the before and after… and a little gif of the process, as well…

Shroomy Shelter

So now I had a page that had bleedthru on it… do I just call it a page I can’t draw on or… “what if I did…?” hmmm… acrylic markers? Then it would cover whatever was on the page. Well, I have a limited number of acrylic markers and I didn’t like it with the base colors… so “what if I did…? hmmm added colored pencils to get closer to the colors I was aiming for?… And to remove the graininess, I used an alcohol blender?

It actually turned out really well! The alcohol blender seemed to grab some of the acrylic and mix it with the colored pencils and I was getting colors that I actually liked!

Here’s the ‘ruined’ bleed thru page and the finished drawing, as well as a little gif of the process…