Belle process post! Also: How to Rubber Cement Your Way to Flat Watercolor Success (Patreon)

Guys. LOOK.

At this perfect creature.

Her name is Belle (ignore my misspelling) and she belongs to Louis, to whom I'm grateful for letting me gaze upon her beautiful adorable face for so many hours, as a Professional Job.

(Our model tonight wound up catching the flu, so we had to skip figure drawing. Luckily I've got plenty of pet portrait process posts to catch you up on!)

Louis requested "cartoony" and I ran with it. Despite her charming looks, Belle has been described as "a goof."

I used some very light colors to outline her with, because she's such a delicate color.

I don't know why, but melon-orangesicle felt like the right color to put in the background. I knew I'd need a little help from gouache on this one, to get it looking creamy.

There are REALLY subtle changes between these two shots - it's all just a darkening of the linework. I really liked the softness of the first stage, but it felt unfinished, so I darkened the outlines a bit.

I left it in this stage for DAYS before I decided that it still felt unfinished, and went in with even darker lines and shapes. These next two look almost identical, too. Can you catch the differences?

Same thing: just a darkening of the lines and shadows. If you look at the earliest almost-finished stage next to the final stage, it's much easier to see what changed:

I loooooved her peach-colored nose! Here's the final scan bigger so you can see better:

The accidental swipe of peach on her left cheek tells you it's not Ai. 🤌🏻

So, as promised, here's a breakdown of how I rubber cement all the curl out of watercolor paper. I've always told people that if I rubber cement something for you, it's a sign of love, because it's kind of a pain, imo.

As suggested by the blue painter's tape on the process photos, I'm painting these 8x10" portraits on larger 9x12" Blick hot press watercolor blocks, which means that once I slice the sheet off the block...

... I have plenty of paper left over around the finished size. This way I can cut it down AFTER it's been rubber cemented to a sheet of mat board, so they'll be flush with each other.

I keep a big tin of Best-Test rubber cement in storage, and pour it into this old Elmer's jar so I can use the brush-in-the-lid thingy, and so it takes up less space. (I don't have an opinion of which rubber cement is best; they both do the job!)

Here I'm brushing it onto the front of a sheet of acid-free mat board (acid-free so that Belle's portrait will last hundreds of years after she and her humans are gone, without yellowing). I've roughly penciled out an 8x10" shape on it so I know how far to apply the cement.

You can see in the background that I've already rubber cemented the back of the Belle portrait. Using a light box, I lightly drew the 8x10" shape of the final piece on the back so that, again, I would make sure to apply cement all the way to the edges. The edges are the most important part!

I keep expired credit cards and ID cards next to my rubber cement kit so that I can do this:

Squeegeeing the excess rubber cement so that it doesn't pool up in one spot. This'll make it quicker to dry, too.

Yep, dry. You want both sheets COMPLETELY dry before you splootch them together. If you splootch them while wet, they'll form a temporary bond. While dry, they'll form a permanent bond.

It takes about half an hour and it'll look like this: tacky, but not damp.

Y'know, this actually isn't such a pain. It's just really hard for me to keep two glued sheets of paper glue-up anywhere in my house without getting cat hair and/or cats all over them while they dry.

Once the glue on both the mat board and the back of my artwork has dried, I line them up and prepare to splootch. I start with one side...

... and gently use a clean, dry palm to press the the rest of it down, starting at the left side where it's already adhered.

Once the splootching has happened, I'm going to cut the art and the mat board down to 8x10" together.

Obviously I keep one hand on the metal ruler as I slice it, but it's not easy to use a blade and a camera at the same time.

Voila!

That shit is SO FLAT.

By the way, in the first photo where I'm brushing the rubber cement, the artwork looks pretty flat; you'll have to trust me that it's not. I always talk about the benefits of using a watercolor BLOCK to keep the paper flat, but even off a block, my art always has just a SLIGHT curl, and I feel awkward sending out artwork that's more than a hundred bucks without backing it first. Just feels like the right thing to do.

I hope this tutorial helps some of you! If you have any questions I didn't answer, fire away in the comments!