Playing with Underpainting

After busy weeks packing orders after the shop updates, I'm already thrilled to go back to creating new things! For a while I've had a couple of sketches scattered across journals, sketchbooks and loose scraps of paper, so I'm slowly starting to tackle each of them and I'm excited to share the behind the scenes with you all!

I wanted to begin with a full gouache piece, since I haven't done a big illustration in a while. This was going to be quite a challenging painting, as I wanted to use lots of blues and muted colours to paint a night scene.
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As usual, I started with a sketch and a digital colour study. I stuck to muted blues and picked a few warmer tones like red and browns. *just a note to myself, these muted blues with bright cadmium red accents look soooo good! I really need to make something with that colour palette soon*

I usually start with a very light wash of yellowish orange, that serves as a guide of the areas I want to leave unpainted and also makes the overall painting a bit warmer. However, since it's such a light colour, when working with thick gouache layers it makes almost no difference if I use it or not. Although I was going to use lots of cool blues, I didn't want the illustration to feel too cold, so I gathered all my courage and painted a strong first layer with yellows, oranges and salmon pink. 

I used acrylic gouache paints to make sure they didn't reactivate once I painted on top of them. I thinned the paint with water so that I could still see the sketch lines underneath. And now there was no turning back! The whole painting was looking so odd with all those yellows and oranges. To cover all of this, I was going to need thicker gouache layers.

Seeing the gouache covering those crazy yellows was such a relief and fun process! I made sure to leave a few unpainted spots, so the bright yellows underneath could still peek here and there. And after a while the painting was finally coming to life! I specially like how the yellows were still a bit visible on the dress and some spots of the background, which makes the tones a lot more interesting and warmer.

After a couple more spots and some scribbles with coloured pencils, the illustration was finished!

This has been such a fun experiment and I really want to use this techinque a lot more on my illustrations! I won't be using it all the time, but for those pictures with large areas of a single colour or where I want the tones to look more interesting, I'll definitely give it a go!

When we're so focused on creating content for our online communities, we often forget about experimenting just for fun. Also I really love to share the process with you, so I'm really excited about this new little corner here, where I'll be inspired to try new techniques and draw more stuff for fun!

I hope you guys enjoyed seeing this illustration process!
Until next time, stay cosy,
​Inês