Painting a background with gouache 🦐 🍜Process (Patreon)

Hi Patrons ! 👋

Sorry I have been quiet these days. I was working on several paintings at the same time and kind of got lost along the way 😪

I have been dreaming of painting a scenery on a bigger format, so that's what I started a few weeks ago. I wanted to paint something very graphic and simple to start, so I chose to illustrate a photograph of Natacha Bird, a French blogger, from one of her trip to Japan. I planned on going to South Korea & Japan this year (not sure if it will still happen with everything going on with the virus...) but with that in my mind, the idea of drawing something related to Japan really motivated me to finally paint more backgrounds.

Here's the original picture by Natacha, and my first sketch on iPad. As you can see, I went for a warmer palette :

So from there I printed the sketch out and traced it on my light table. I chose to paint on a bigger format than usual, this is size A3 and this is XL watercolor paper from Canson.

First session went well, I was happy with out it turned out. I started with the grey-ish brown tones in the background.

I think adding the blue & red was the most satisfying part 😍

Day 2 - I focused on finishing the girl.

Day 3 -It was fun to add the little details that make the background "alive". 

At first I painted a little black door on this wall (as you can see on the first pictures) but started to ask why would there be one door here, it seemed odd. So I added a window with a little curtain.

And here's the final illustration ! I don't know how much time I have spent on this painting, but I think it's close to 7 hours. I also stopped working on it for several days and finally took the time to finish it yesterday.

I am happy with the result ! I don't really like her face though, I slightly changed it and cleaned it in Photoshop after I scanned the illustration this morning.

Here's the scanned version ! I will make prints of this one for my shop update in 2 weeks (my shop will open on March 23rd by the way !). It will be an A4 (21cm x 29,7cm) instead of the usual A5 (14.8cm x 21cm) :

I hope you'll like it !
I will try to make more of these this year. Painting backgrounds is fun but so hard and scary  to me !
Let me know what scenery you'd like to see :)

Next time I will record a process video. I am currently looking for a good camera but it's hard to know what's really good or not without trying first. I have a Canson EOS M10 but it's not as good as I expected. I purchased it 3 years ago and it never felt right to me. If you have any recommendations, let me know !

That's it for today,
Thanks again for your support on Patreon ! 🧡😍✨

Hugs,

Sibylline