Slovember WIP

[demotlj]

I worked on a sketch that I had done during Inktober that I never developed of flying squirrels. For Slovember, I did it digitally and ditched it, did it as a line and wash on hot press which looked pretty awful, and did it as a line and wash on cold press which is ok but I'm not in love with it. Here is that last -- watercolor with pencil and brown dip pen. Although I can't make any compositional changes at this point, do you have any suggestions on improving the rendering?

[demotlj]

Here's my final version. I don't know that it benefitted from having a month to work on it, but I learned a lot of things that don't work!

[Braxton]

@demotlj This is really fun! Out of curiosity, how did you go from the first to the second version? Digital adjustments or did you do additional painting?

[demotlj]

@Braxton Both. I painted the watercolor so that it was more saturated and added a lot more pen work but then after I took a photo of it, I also did a lot of adjustments in my photo software, mostly to try to get it to look closer to the original.

I find watercolor difficult to photograph, even when I have the lighting done well, because I think it loses its luminescence when I photograph it. I have the same problem with pencil work -- it looks good to my eye but in the photo it washes out. I adjusted the photo with photo software upping the saturation, the contrast, and the clarity a little, and I adjusted the tint to match the original as best I can. I did some of that on the first photo but without the additional paint and pen work, it didn't help much!

[Braxton]

@demotlj Nice! You definitely get much better contrast in the second version, and I think the additional line work adds a lot of visual interest. Have you tried scanning the watercolor instead of photographing it? Sometimes I feel like using a scanner removes too much texture, but maybe I'm just not doing it right (or using a nice enough scanner...)

[demotlj]

@Braxton I have tried scanning but have never been happy with the results. It may be because I have a pretty cheap scanner - just what comes on my super cheap printer.

[Asyas_illos]

I agree I like the warmth the second one brings and super fun concept! Well done mate! I also don’t like the photo quality when I photograph my watercolors, it just doesn’t do justice!

[demotlj]

@powsupermum Thanks. I keep trying to learn to paint digitally so I don't have to worry about photographing my watercolors but so far, I'm pretty bad at it

[Asyas_illos]

@demotlj I am in the same boat I’ve been practicing in procreate pocket on my phone until I get my new tablet. Digital painting is hard! I am not much of a computer person also so I got that going against me...