Watercolor Pencil Experiments: Great Dane Puppy

Yesterday I decided to kick things up a notch with my new watercolor pencils by creating a "test" dog portrait. I plan to use water as a solvent to try and create a very smooth, colored pencil portrait. I’m using a hot press Lana watercolor block as a support to encourage smoothness. Hot press isn’t normally my favorite for watercolor, I much prefer cold press. But so far I’ve really liked the way the watercolor pencils lay down on the hot press paper.

I’ve chosen a rather limited palette of pinks, cool greys, and cool blues for the Harlequin puppy, with a background of dark, cool aqua. The under-painting is done in Deep Indigo (another experiment as I usually do my under-paintings in cool purple).

 Here is the under-painting of the puppy before being wet.

The photo I am using is pinned above.

A closer look at the dry under-painting.

Here is the same under-painting after water was applied.

Here we go! Stay tuned for more Great Dane puppy coming soon!