How to Watercolor your own characters

Here we focus on original characters mostly. I like to take our designs from photographs, occasionally making changes but keeping those consistent.

We have been doing preliminary sketches for scenes in our upcoming comic, D'n'A, and here I took a sketch and watercolored it, exploring effects and trying a few different techniques.

I'll have the first couple of pages of the comic up soon and update it every week.

I use watercolor pencils on this piece.

Watercolor: four how-to examples

(resized for blog; link included to source)
Here in this rough cut video, we see different methods: watercolor pencils as well as a nice set of watercolor paint in tubes, applied with brushes.

Four examples, including photo reference.
Here it is back at its upload source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeZmemTln_4




Two demonstrate starting with a drawing; in one, ink and other pens are applied to solidify form and experiment with textured colors. One is a free hand painting done with the extra paint I'd spread. The last one, incomplete at this time, shows working with a landscape, from life, then referring to a picture later.