★ Acrylic Gouache & Coloured Pencil Process ★

[Music] hello friends i hope you are having a fantastic start to october for those of you who watched last week's video you'll know that the clue i had given for this week's halloween illustration was that you could say that this character had two mothers many of you had guessed correctly that it was coraline there were a handful of people who also guessed rapunzel which given that clue was definitely a great guess as well but since it is spooky season i of course had to draw coraline last week's video when i painted kiki from kiki's delivery service i had used gouache for the entire illustration but this time i decided to use some acrylic gouache with colored pencils on hot press watercolor paper by the way all of the supplies that i'm using in today's video as usual will be listed in the description down below so for those of you who don't already know i tend to favor cold press watercolor paper since i find that the light texture helps get smoother washes of paint typically watercolors however i decided that i would bust out my hot press paper for this piece since i knew that i wanted to use a lot of color pencils as the kind of final layer and i find that with textured paper colored pencils just looks a little bit too textured for what i generally want since my work tends to be a little bit more on the kind of detailed smoother side per usual i start off by sketching with a red erasable colored pencil i do apologize that it may have been a little difficult to see people often ask me to include my sketching process in my videos more often but i sketch very lightly which sometimes is hard to see on camera i prefer to go in with a very light hand since that i know i'll end up doing a lot of erasing during the early sketching phases and i don't want to ruin the surface of the paper by pressing too hard since if you press too hard with the pencil either you're going to leave behind sketch marks that you didn't want or you're potentially going to actually kind of dig into the paper surface as well leaving kind of divots and you definitely don't want that of course you can always do your sketch on a different piece of paper and use a light table to trace your sketch onto the watercolor paper which is definitely a technique that i often use as well but for this piece i decided to sketch directly onto the watercolor paper to save on time and that way i could use i could utilize the fact that this is actually a watercolor block which for those of you who don't know watercolor blocks actually have most of the paper's edges glued on the sides to prevent the paper from warping when you're painting on it this allows you to skip the step of taping it down to a board so fun fact i actually had to take a picture of myself to try and get these hands right i initially tried to do the sketch without a reference photo but hands are really really difficult to draw so i did end up taking a kind of silly looking photo of myself holding a water bottle to try and get the um the position right and that i found helped a lot in getting the hands to look a little bit more natural i often get people asking me to make videos on anatomy or how to draw people portraits hands etc and just to be frank i probably will never make a video quite like that the reason is because i am still learning myself the best piece of advice i can give you is to use reference photos when you're unfamiliar with drawing something and when i say reference photos i mean an actual photograph from reality not somebody else's drawing of course there's definitely nothing wrong with doing studies or analyzing another artist's work but if we're talking about learning and understanding the fundamentals it's best to use real photographs so that you're not potentially picking up someone else's mistakes of course if you can draw from life that is even better but that is not always possible or accessible when it's something very particular so thankfully we live in an age where there are an infinite amount of resources at our fingertips through the internet but if you can't find the right reference photo you can always take a photo of yourself like how i did for this piece and i literally just used the webcam and the self timer on my old laptop to try and get the photograph of my hands holding a water bottle which of course in place in this illustration is coraline's doll then when i'm finished the sketch i do one more pass using the faber castell polychromos colored pencils i do this so that i can get a darker more visible sketch but also these pencils are oil based which resist water so when i begin painting they won't smudge too much or disappear under the paint and water i get a ton of questions about the colors i use in my illustrations and about mixing colors so for a special treat for you guys i have included the mixing palette in the video so you can see it all in action this piece of course the color mixing is pretty simple but hopefully it is helpful or interesting for you guys anyways and before you ask the little dropper that you'll see me use is just filled with water i find that it's a controlled way of diluting my gouache and it ensures that i'm using clean water as well since i'm definitely guilty of not cleaning my mixing water very often and so it gets muddy pretty quickly and so i find that having the kind of dropper of water helps me get cleaner mixes so for coraline skin i used white and a light peach for the base skin tone and then i used that mixture with a little bit of red for the blush warmer areas of her face and hands i premix both colors so that i can alternate between the two of them while the paint is still wet this allows for the colors to blend into one another a little easier and i also use a clean wet brush to help soften edges and blur the two colors together as well and i guess it's also important to note that i also have quite a bit of water mixed into this paint as well i find that it helps make the paint flow a little bit better and that way it's not too thick for these very early stages in the painting process and again since i knew i was going to be using colored pencils on top i didn't want to make the paint too thick and i wanted to make sure that it was very flat and so some of you probably already know this but acrylic wash when it's dry it's dry you can't reactivate it and so i knew that i didn't need this much of this peach color anymore and so i just filled in the background even though i knew that the color of the background wasn't going to be pink anyways but i figured i might as well use the paint regardless and then as you saw i added in more white because i was finding that uh coraline's skin was looking a little bit too dark and a little bit too saturated so i'm now going in again pretty much using the same techniques as previously but having a slightly lighter mixture and i basically just added white to both colors and using the same kind of back and forth technique that i use for the first layer i'm adding in the colors on her face and her hands [Music] so at this point i felt like she was still a little bit too tan because i feel as though coraline is quite pale and so as i'm waiting for that layer to dry i decided to move on to painting her hair and of course we all know that coraline's hair is blue but i really enjoy kind of putting variations in the colors so i went ahead and created two color mixtures like i did with the skin i created a purple color and this blue color the purple color actually was straight out of the tube and then i mixed that purple in with a little bit of blue and tons of water and similar to how i painted the skin i'm kind of just going back and forth alternating between the two colors just to get some variation in the hue and i'm using the same two colors for the sweater as well and if you've seen coraline you'll know that the sweater that she wears has these kind of glow-in-the-dark white stars and you can see that i sketched them in here i decided to just paint over them and i would deal with adding in the white stars later because i felt like it was just going to be way too time consuming to try and paint around each individual star and speaking of this sweater i decided to choose this sweater over her very iconic yellow rain jacket because when i re-watched the movie recently kind of prepping myself trying to get inspiration for this piece i i just really gravitated towards this glow-in-the-dark star sweater and i felt like the rain jacket look for coraline while very iconic has been done quite a bit and she only wears it very briefly at the beginning of the movie so i felt like i could kind of have that tied in with the doll and then that way the sweater can contrast the yellow rain jacket of the doll [Music] and then here you can see i am adding in another layer on the skin which you would have seen i just added in more white to that mixture and going in and this time only kind of hitting the lighter parts of the hands and the face and i'm using a clean wet brush to just sort of blur out the edges into the layer that's already existing and then again going in with a second layer for the hair and the sweater using the purple and blue mixture and at this point you can kind of see that we're getting way more opacity and it's looking less patchy but again i know that i'm using colored pencils on top anyway so i'm not worrying too too much about it looking perfect [Music] then of course i couldn't forget the iconic yellow rain jacket and i ended up just using straight up yellow and a tiny bit of white for this mixture and then you'll see i add in a ton of water to a section second mixture for the moon and i obviously looked at a ton of different kind of promotional posters and things like that for inspiration for this piece and for the majority of the time the moon motif in the coraline posters were often like a blue or at least a kind of glowing white blue and originally i thought i was going to go with that as well but then i felt like the yellow of the rain jacket on the coraline doll was so bright and i needed something else to try and kind of balance that and so i ended up deciding to have the moon a yellow as well which in the end i think worked out really well because as you know yellow and purple are opposites on the color wheel and so i felt like the yellow of the moon behind coraline really helped contrast nicely with her kind of purple blue hair and since i hate wasting paint if i can i went ahead and mixed that yellow with a little bit of of the purple blue and a little bit of red i believe to create the brown color for her eyes and her eyebrows and then now as you can see we've switched to the colored pencils and i switched the angle here for the camera because i find that when i'm holding the pencils so closely to the kind of base it's hard to see what i'm doing from a top down camera angle and so that's why we're kind of at an angle here so you can actually see what i'm doing and so yeah i don't know if you guys know this i've mentioned in a few videos but color pencils is actually the medium that i kind of really started out with in my high school years and so it was really nice to just kind of go back to my tried and true colored pencils and i find that using this kind of combination of the gouache and the color pencils it creates a very nice light texture which i think really lends itself to coraline since stop-motion animation kind of has this very tactile imperfect look to it of course because they are actual sculptures and so i felt like having this medium combination really suited that even though i am kind of going in with a very kind of clean line art approach there is something a little bit more children's book illustration about it i'm not really sure how to explain it but i really really enjoyed doing the color pencil for this and i also decided to use the color pencils as the liner as you can see here with the hair just to kind of yeah create that textured soft look as opposed to using a paint for the line art and for the sweater if you've seen kind of close-ups of the sweater it's actually like a woven knit and i didn't want to go go for the woven knit necessarily so i decided to do this kind of hatching technique and to create a bit of a texture and i really really like how it looks it's something very fun about it i think especially with the stars as well and similar to how i approached the painting portion of this sweater i also kind of alternated between a couple different colors and then now i'm finally putting in those stars i just used a white colored pencil and i did initially start with a little bit of a pink but i ended up just using the white color pencil so that it could get the most kind of oomph from it and of course i had to add in coraline's little freckles i think freckles are so adorable and i just very lightly put them in with the colored pencil and then i felt like the background was just looking way too flat and so i went ahead and used colored pencil to create very light kind of clouds in the background and i felt like that really helped bring a little bit more dimension to the background without overpowering the rest of the piece because of course we want coraline to be the focal point also by the way if you're wondering why i have a little post-it note that i kind of keep moving around the page it's because my hand was starting to smudge and pick up the color pencil so that is my little tip for you guys if you're using a lot of colored pencils is to have a piece of paper or something underneath your hand so that you're not smudging it all over the place so like i had mentioned earlier i actually went ahead and re-watched coraline recently and i gotta say even though i've already seen it before it was still quite the creepy movie which of course is perfect for this season i remember when i went to see it in theaters i actually saw it in 3d and normally i don't care for seeing movies in 3d but i will say coraline was definitely the exception i remember the standout moment was the scene where coraline is at the circus and she's watching all the mice do their stunts it was wild to watch in 3d and i just remember thinking how is a stop-motion animation this is insane so yeah not too long ago i started following leica studios on instagram who is the studio who made coraline as well as a lot of other great stop-motion animated films like kubo and the two strings and paranorman and if you've been with my channel for a little bit you'll already know that i am a big lover of animated films but i realized i actually haven't really touched on my love of stop-motion animation as well i highly recommend taking a peek at the leica studios instagram page because they post a bunch of behind the scenes content on how these films are made and it is truly incredible animation in general of course is an absolute labor of love but i feel like stop motion is just like on a whole nother level of dedication and i really really admire the craft i am not a very patient person so seeing how long and tedious these projects are it's it's amazing and another favorite stop-motion animated film of mine is fantastic mr fox as well as isle of dogs which are both directed by wes anderson i of course loves his films in general he's got great humor and the style of his films are fantastic so it's just the ultimate treat to see his vision in stop-motion animation so yeah i highly recommend checking them out if you haven't already and that brings us to the end of the illustration i hope that you had fun watching coraline come to life [Music] hello friends i am back for another clue so for those of you who don't know i am doing a whole series of halloween themed illustrations for the month of october and so next week's character clue is that these two characters go to school together to practice magic and you could say that they loathe each other so let me know who you think or hope it's going to be in the comments down below and i will see you in next week's video bye [Music]

Channel: imawonder

Views: 56,526

Rating: 4.9894361 out of 5

Keywords: coraline, mixed media illustration, acrylic gouache, liquitex gouache, imawonder, im a wonder, coloured pencil, colored pencil, pencil crayon

Id: ITpI2OMUHPI

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020