Gnome Studies 3

More Gnome sketches for practice. After the work of Poortvliet.

   Hi, pals! I hope you have been enjoying the "Gnome Studies" posts lately (1,2). I know it has been fun for me to share them with you. When it came to doing today's gnome, I wanted to break a bit further away from my reliance on the work of other artists. I also knew that I wanted to test out the use of watercolor pencils.

Here you can see that I have sketched out three gnomes. I went a bit more cartoony with the two children. I came up with the idea of a less friendly and colorful gnome that could be their uncle or something like that. He is a bit of an odd ball and seems gruffer than he really is. (Who knows maybe he's part Siberian Gnome. That could explain it, huh?)

I then began to work in the base colors for some background elements. As you can see here.

After that, I started to paint in light base colors for the gnomes. I then started working in darker tones to define their forms and add some contrast and detail.

And finally, I used watercolor pencils to do this even more. I left the pencil marks dry for some bits in order to add texture and keep the contrast and detail. I also barely wet the marks in some areas to soften them up. When wetting the watercolor pencil marks with varying amounts of water on your brush, you can change how much they look like marks made by the pencil or brush. This is also good for blending colors and softening details.

And here is a computer scanned version of the studies. I painted the vignettes on the same piece of paper and small, so it just happened I could easily scan them. (As you may be able to see, even after adjusting the colors in Photoshop, they still aren't quite the same as in the original paintings.) I thought It would be nice to show them to you all together.

I hope you enjoyed today's gnome post! I'll be posting more of the gnomes I've painting for the upcoming exhibit soon. Until then, God Bless!!!