Hi! I am a rising senior at the Ringling College of Art and Design. I love using watercolor. My main interests are in trade children’s book illustration, book covers, and fine art.
This is a great beginning, but I agree with @smceccarelli about the trees in the front. It feels to me like they are blocking my eyepath and trapping me in. I understand the use of them as a framing device, but it feels like a fence, not a frame right now. It kind of has a somber feeling to me for some reason and is not as light/elated feeling as some as your other work. Excited to see where this goes!
Concept wise, color is the same regardless of medium, and I would think the same advice in the videos about digital would apply to using watercolor. Decide what you want the overall color to feel like for your story, and stick to that.
As far as the technical aspect of watercolor, how familiar are you with your paints, and how much experience do you have using them? The advice to limit your color palette is a good one, which can be done by limiting the paints in your palette that you use, sticking to a predetermined color scheme in the final image, or both. If you don't feel as confident mixing colors, then having fewer colors will help unify everything. Swatching, testing colors, and doing color studies before you begin final illustrations will help you understand your color scheme. You could do a color mixing exercise to figure out what different mixes all your paints can make if you don't have much experience with what the pigments will do yet. Mess around with your watercolors for a bit before starting the project to get used to them. You need to know what mixes you are capable of making.
With your example asking if you mix colors with burnt sienna in one image, then should you do it in others for consistency, the answer is maybe. It doesn't actually matter how you get to the color you want, as long as the color on the illustration is the color that you want. It would certainly make it easier to stay consistent if you use the same pigments throughout. Like I mentioned earlier, get to know your paints, because some pigments get really dull when mixed with certain colors.
Plan out what color scheme you want, then do color studies before your finals to make sure it's the colors that you want.
Day 07: Exhausted, the cypress flower for despair.
Very loose and not too happy with this one, but a learning experience it was indeed.
For Day 06/Drooling, I chose the hydrangea since the root word means water. Switched it up and used a Pentel brushpen. Goodness, that thing is tricky.
I interpreted Day 05/Chicken as Fear, and chose the begonia which symbolizes dark thoughts.
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