Portrait for our wedding
This is the result of a marathon painting session, Saturday to Sunday! It took roughly 17 hours total, though I will probably do a couple edits here and there. One of the last things on my wedding to-do list was a portrait of Chris and me, using one of the photos we took at Round Top last summer. This is a fairly large watercolor. I bought a set of stained wood frames for this and our “guest book” signing poster (once it’s framed), and naturally had to work to meet the size of the frame. I still gave myself a pretty wide margin and used the standard hot press Arches paper that I use for the comic.
For the transfer, I used graphite paper, which worked fairly well, though some detail was still lost. I then refined the details in graphite, and went over the key traits in colored pencil to make sure they were preserved before I started muddying up the drawing with watercolor. I like this technique a lot; it helps me punch up facial characteristics since darks can dry lighter in watercolors. That said, it’s a fine line; it’s very easy to go overboard with the pencil and lose the subtlety of watercolor. I had to start a commission over this summer by getting carried away with pencil definition in that first stage.
I forgot to take an in-progress shot so the watercolor magically appears in my photos six hours later haha. But I did the skin and hair first, then went back through and did pencil coloring on the clothing (mostly my dress) and finally the watercolor on the clothing. I’m a strong believer that things that exist below a layer in real life should be painted first, so the top layer exists naturally above the lower layer (i.e. the skin is below the clothing layer).
However, I left the background for the end, because I felt like my approach would be influenced by how the figures came out. I just said that it’s important to me to paint lower layers first to make sure they fall naturally in the different depths of the painting, but in this case it' just didn’t make sense. So to protect the figures, I masked the silhouette with a very thin painters tape, which I first reduced the stickiness of to ensure the paper didn’t rip upon removal. I also masked the edges of the composition to maintain clean lines on the margins. I did a few very thin layers of the background, and compared to the photo, made sure to keep the contrast faint. That was something I didn’t like about our photos—the contrast behind us is very high, and if I had the wallet to shell out for Photoshop, it’s something I would change. Thankfully, in watercolor that can be done for free!
Overall, I’m very pleased with how it came out. The in-progress shots make it look a little garish because the new Google Pixel camera makes it impossible to turn off HDR settings—this means drawings and paintings always look insanely high-contrast and heavy-handed. But in the actual painting, the only thing I have left is flattening the paper. I recently re-learned a trick to correct paper buckling, which involves wetting the back of the paper and sandwiching it between two weighted boards for 24 hours.
This is what it looks like in the frame :)
