Watercolor time, and Leo time! I wanted to do a plain watercolor portrait and a self portrait this time, since is is my month of the year, August! Thus I chose to use warm colors, orange, instead of my usual nature and green theme.

It has been, and still is a year of wonder, not necessarily in good sense though, but this year has impacted all of us and here we are, coping and surviving. I hope everyone is doing well.

WIP and tools:

• 

• 

Above you can see the first initial layers I did, before continuing with more layers after this was entirely dry.

So, as I mentioned earlier running out of watercolor paper, I also got new watercolor papers to use. I bought few different brands, all hot press but still a bit different. I now first used this St Cuthberts Mill Bockingford aquarelle paper, hot press (satin) 300GSM A3. It was a bit grainier than other hot press papers I’ve used earlier, but it was quite nice to use anyway. Not too textured and very thick, however the paper did buckle and the too narrow washi tape took off from the board. (you can see in above image a bit of warping)

I used my old trusty St Petersburg White Nights watercolors, mainly oranges and browns and this time with more layers and full drying times in between so I would then finish this only with watercolors detailing and not resorting to colored pencils for additional details. I did use colored pencil to sketch the initial image, but not for any shading or after effects. I like to use either colored pencil or watercolor pencils for watercolor painting sketches, instead of graphite pencils.

Final image:

---