Combining Watercolors And Acrylics For Depth

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  Step 1

  I start out light and apply acrylic paint with a waterbrush. Waterbrushes have water in the handle and a sponge above the brush that feeds water into the bristles as you paint. I like using waterbrushes for application of both acrylics and watercolors as they give me greater control over the amount of paint I'm laying down. Once that's done, take a break, walk the dog, bake a pie, work on another piece of art, do something that will keep you from staring at your canvas trying to will it to dry with your mind.

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  Step 2

  Use watercolors for the shadows in the face. I use a lot of purples and greens in this process. She looks like some freaky mutant. Let's move onto the next step quick! (after the watercolor dries. Stupid paint).

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  Step 3

  Using "vintage white" (sort of a bone color) and a waterbrush, smooth out those layers of watercolor until she's shaded and doesn't look quite so much like something that should be shambling around in a George Romero movie.

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  Step 4

  For hair, I slop on full-strength acrylic with a cheapo brush and usually completely ignore my charcoal sketch lines. That's completely okay, rub them with a wet brush and they disappear completely!

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  Step 5

  Using watercolors again, give her hair some shading and work some more deeper shades back into her face

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  Step 6

  Using white acrylic (wicker white this time, a much brighter white), work in highlights and give her hair some dimension. This is usually when I add teeth and the "shines" to her eyes.

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  Step 7

  This is when I decided she needed a beet crown. With burgundy acrylic, I dabbed on some random beet-shaped blobs and then used "thicket" (dark green) for the shadows. I do a lot of shading with complementary colors as it give greater depth and dimension to your work. That almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about, right? Awesome. I do the watercolor treatment on dark colors too, it's just harder to see until you....

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  Step 8

  ADD WHITE! Ta-daaa!! At this point I worked some more darks into her hair, added a wash of white to the beets and then blobs of dark green watercolor for the deeper shadows. I also used random spots and piles of white to bring the crown and hair together into one cohesive mass.

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  Step 9

  Finally, I mixed a deep turquoise acrylic 1:1 with water and splattered the entire canvas with a toothbrush. Messy! Fun! The final scanned version is at the top of this post.

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Laura

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Laura · Chandler, Arizona, US · 133 projects 6th September 2014

I tried painting with acrylic and watercolor before on paper for a christmas card and it worked so poorly that I never thought to try it on other surfaces! I'm excited to try and play with this again and it will be perfect for a painting I was thinking of trying to do sometime, thank you for the inspiration on trying this mix again!

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