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  I just tripled my productivity! : pNov 17, 2015 5:38 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Hopefully it hasn't been too obvious, but for the past four pages now there's been a war going on in my head of pencils versus watercolors. Previously, I'd been resolved to erase all pencil marks in the course of laying down the watercolor; this could sometimes mean I'd lose the direction of my original line and subsequently spend a lot of time trying to rediscover it directly in watercolor, which could get pretty messy. Four pages ago, on page 65, I was fed up with that (after rather disastrous line loss in the course of doing page 64 : p), and also came up with a pencil sketch that was so spidery and intricate that I couldn't see how I would reproduce it in watercolor anyway, so I kept all the pencil lines, and just filled them in very carefully in watercolor. That worked decently, and on the next few pages I even managed to get the painting a little more dynamic while keeping the pencils beneath it; I was still a little worried that relying nearly entirely on the pencils for the linework would limit the potential impact of the painting, but the real, hidden problem with this approach—which snuck up and ambushed me today in a big way—is that I was now convinced that the pencil lines had to be final quality, so I was spending more and more time getting them just so.
 
Today I was so paranoid about getting the pencils down perfectly that I went through three major versions of the page; I could have saved myself a lot of time, for instance, if I had stuck with this mid-way version of the second one:
 
Image
 
That minimalist, angular line approach is actually the style I would like to get to using more often—but, aside from the pose maybe not being quite the most appropriate one for this particular page, and me being unsure at that point how I would color that huge open area of face, hair, and neck, I thought I would just go in and tidy up some of the pencil lines here and there—so I could keep them in the final, painted version, you see—and in the course of fussing with them, rather sucked the life out and spoiled the whole thing, and ended up having scrap it and start over. : P
 
So what I *think* I've learned from today's marathon is that a) while I should make sure I've worked out things like proportions, eyeball positions, and so on, I don't have to tidy up all the pencil lines because b) a lot of the final polish should be left to the watercolor brush anyway—although c) it's still okay to leave pencil lines alongside the watercolor!
 
Whew! War over, for now—I hope. : o
 
 
 
 
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