Added 1 new A* page:I generally don't draw out the shading in the pencil phase of these watercolor pages. I probably should, but its much more fun to whack in shadows with a brush, rather than just following lines you've already drawn.
So often, as in today's page, I don't draw the shadow behind the bridge of the nose in pencil. This leaves the eyes and nose floating independently, which is a little dangerous because it's hard to tell if one is slightly out of position, which turned out to be the case today.
What then do you do if you've already got a page almost fully painted (you'd thought) and only then discover that a major organ, say, is out of position? Watercolor doesn't really allow you to repaint it neatly. In tandem with white ink, you can sort of nudge the edges over a bit, but that usually doesn't solve the problem fully, and gets a bit messy anyhow. In some recent pages I've felt like I left something in there that I knew was slightly off, but couldn't correct neatly—and whenever I do that, whatever it is that I left always ends up bugging me.
So I decided to go big and just tear into it—better to have a weird mess than a tidy bad drawing. Obliterate the eye, broadly and sludgily repaint the bridge of the nose several times between layers of white ink, knock the lips around; whatever seems out of place, just hit it and see what happens.
For the final messy touch, I found that it's a lot easier to create a spray effect with watercolor than I had thought. With white ink, to create spatter for stars I have to spring-launch the thick, gummy ink by flicking an ink-laden flexible metal nib and a flexible plastic card against each other. Watercolor's a lot thinner, though, so (I've seen hints of this before, most recently on someone's Instagram video, exactly where I forget now) you can just hold a brush or pencil out, right over the painting, take your watercolor-laden brush, and smack it into the stationary brush/pencil/whatever, kind of like you used to do in pencil fights in grade school; the impact is sufficient to spatter the watercolor off of the moving brush and onto the painting below.
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