ART CARD TUTORIAL
in watercolor, ink, and colored pencil

In most of my ACEO art cards, I use a three-medium process of watercolor, ink, and colored pencil.  First we will start with the sketches of three fairy musicians. 

Then I lay down a preliminary watercolor wash to make a common color base---it makes the colors on top seem more blended and related to eachother. I'm not particularly precise on this step, as you can see the flute one dried really funky-looking! I upped the contrast on this image a lot in Photoshop so that the faint lines could be seen.

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Here is where I put down all of the main colors for the pictures. Just basic colors that I will later shade and highlight. It seems I am in a "brunette" mood today, as all of these ladies ended up with dark hair. Thankfully the flute one is turning out despite the drying incident.

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For this step, I've done lots of layering with the watercolor. I start out shading with the same colors on top of eachother for the shadows, and then start adding different colors on top of those. The face shading is generally only the same mix I had in the beginning, just built up. The last part is all the little details like violin parts, eyelashes, mouth lines, deep creases in clothing.

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I start inking the general outline of the figure. From there I'll ink smaller sections such as the silhouette of clothing, objects, wings, and might add a little detail like the mouth line and strings in the guitar fairy picture. Sometimes I'll do the silhouette of the background objects, sometimes not. I also put in my teeny signature at this time.
For the flute fairy I used sepia ink because of its cool spectrum colors and because it is fairly dark. For the other two, I've used the warmer/lighter peat brown ink.

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For this final stage, I go in with my Prismacolor colored pencils and tighten up all the details, deepen the shadows and put in the highlights. I usually mix all kinds of colors in to make it interesting (such as purple in the violin fairy's hair). After the pictures are done, I spray them with matte fixative and then they go into their little plastic sleeves!

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