Research - Watercolor tips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-dq-2mhCkU&t=131s - Watercolor pencil basic guide - 20/04/20 

This was a basic tutorial on how to use water paints, something I have been looking at as a way to
expand on my concept art. As I cant use my 3ds max currently I am working on stuff that doesn't
require that , this means concept art is going to be expanded into other areas. The basic stuff that i
learnt from this video included different ways of using and adding water to affect the strength of the
colours. 

The first basic use was simply drawing on paper and adding water over the top, this means you can
get dark lines where the pencil is concentrated and a lighter area that you can create. He then
showed me a basic way of blending, just drawing two different areas using two different colours, this
means you can create a color that you don't have or a different shade of colour using a certain pattern. 

The next method was to add water to an area on the paper and then draw over the top of it. I didn't
like this method that much as it means you can't really see where your water is on the paper before
you start drawing , but it does make the colour more intense so that would be why you might use this
method.  The last method was probably my favourite, it involves using the pencil and a different
source of colour for the brush. You add water to the brush and then rub it on the end of the pencil to
put colour on the brush. 

I wanted to test out some of these methods so I did a quick perspective drawing of a basic wall in the
temple. It's a shot that I have used in my storyboard and in other concept works that I have created in
the past. I started with a basic outline of the pillars and the walls, each will act as a different surface
for me to draw on. 

I then moved onto adding some more detail to the pillars and the walls, this was just to make sure
that when the paper gets wet I will still be able to see the drawn lines. I'm trying to make it resemble
the concept art and the mudbox model of the pillar that i created, 

This was when I went over the cracks in the pillar with a dark purple, i used the method of applying
paint to a brush directly from the pencil. I did this because I thought it would give me the most control
when it comes to following the lines. Next i went over the purple with a black using the same method,
this had an okay result but i feel like i should have drawn both the purple and black together and used
water to blend them instead. Next i started to work on the colour of the pillars, i knew that i wanted the
center of each segment to be lighter than the outside so i used the purple to draw a perimeter around
each one. I then used the brush and water to get everything wet and draw only a little into the center
of the segment, this helped to create the final effect. I think it looks good and it definitely did what I
hoped it would, I can see why people would prefer to use the drawing then the water method of the
direct painting one. 

I moved onto the black brick walls, to do this I drew a dark line around each brick, similar to the purple
segments on the pillars. This looked okay but i think i may have messed up somewhere. I tried to do
the water then drawing method for the green brick but i really didn't like the way it worked. I feel like
this is the worst method out of all of them for me. I tried to create a blue light at the base of the
temple that would get darker the more it spread out, I don't think it worked very well. I think the
problem was that I added too little of the pencil to the actual paper and it just spread all of the colours
into one big blue area. I think the best method for doing a layered effect like that would be to paint the
brush onto the pencil end and then apply the brush to the paper. 

In conclusion i think i did an okay job for my first attempt at using water coloured pencils, in the future
i will expand to using it to enhance my basic drawings like with blending pencils.