After nearly two months upon discovering that my set of 84 watercolor crayons didn’t match the picture on the front, I returned to the art store to purchase several browns, nearly black, nearly white and two shades of red. The same woman who’d helped me before, helped me again. She remembered me. When she asked about how far off the picture on the box was from what was in the box, I replied, “If I only wanted to paint White people, then it would have been fine.” She nodded and said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Once she finished checking me out at at the register, she then showed me where the watercolor paper was as well as the tracing paper. I told her that I wanted to get an idea of the prices, so I could budget for it. In the meantime, I’m going to have a ball with my new colors, not just to paint people of color, but also expand hair and eye colors without having to obsess about mixing shades. I’m especially eager to render a dark-skinned Black without them looking unrealistically blue.
I loved how the contouring turned out on her backside and back of her knees. The water didn’t turn out how I planned–like most of my painting dreams.
Again, I have to be careful not to elongate features. For some inexplicable reason, she looks armless. There’s some detail that I missed in the tracing and even with the picture printed out, I overlooked her arms, which were subtly shown in the original.
I watched a YouTube video on painting with watercolor crayons that stated these paintings will dry and, almost by magic, look so much better. That was certainly true for her face. His face, on the other hand…not enough magic in the world to salvage his face.
For my next challenge, I’m going to have blonds and gingers!