Recently I was asked by a friend to do a painting of Finn Mcmissile from Cars 2 for their nephew. I usually paint digitally, and I was excited to paint with traditional media. Here is a step by step process.
The first thing I did was nail down the drawing that I would be painting. Because the style I was going for wouldn't have a lot of rendering, it's helpful for me to figure everything out at the drawing stage. Laying out the color at this stage also helped me come up with a plan for which areas to do first.
At this point I used a light table to line up my drawing under the watercolor paper to paint the yellow circle background. The trick with gouache is to mix up the paint well enough on the palette so the color isn't marbleized at all. If the color isn't perfectly mixed, all of the other colors will show up on the paper.
At this point I taped my drawing to the top of the watercolor paper. I used graphite paper to transfer the drawing of the car. To do this you basically lay the graphite paper between the watercolor paper and the drawing, and then trace the drawing. I used the end of a calligraphy pen to trace the drawing. Originally I thought that the drawing would show through all of my paint layers, but what I learned was that I only needed to transfer the first layer I painted. I kept the drawing taped to the paper so that after I finished painting each layer, I could use the graphite paper to transfer the next sections. Keeping it taped ensured the drawing would always line up.
This picture shows some of the flat colors laid in. It's helpful to think about the order in which the colors are laid in. The way I do it is background to foreground, and light to dark. The background to foreground idea is pretty straightforward, I painted the yellow circle first so that I didn't have to paint around the contour of the car. The idea behind light to dark is that darker colors are harder to paint over with lighter colors, so I painted the lighter gray of the car first and then the darker color. In hindsight I probably should have left the white of the paper show through on the windshield, but I found that the white gouache covered really well.
This was the fun part! Here I've started dry brushing some shadows and highlights. The trick to that is not going overboard. Also, using the right brush and having exactly the right mixture of paint/water on the brush. If it's too wet, it just looks too solid. For the dry brush look, you want it to break up and drag across the paper. I used a scrap piece of watercolor paper to test the paint before I used it on the car. I also added in some of the details like his eyes and mustache using a wetter/thinner mixture of paint so that they didn't break up as much and looked a little cleaner.
And here is the final piece. The last step was adding the line work. Overall I am happy with how it turned out. It was fun to get back to using real paint after painting digitally for so long, and I hope to do more painting in the future.
Hopefully this was helpful for someone out there. Thanks for reading!
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