Watercolors and fineliners

This post contains AD-links to the products that I have used.

This is a short post (Ok, it turned out to be pretty loooong…) where I will show you how I usually combine my fineliners with watercolors when I paint.

For this painting I have used Gansai Tambi Watercolors from Zig Kuretake, and also Fineliners from the same brand.

The pink background that you can see on the image below is added digitally in Photoshop.
Please scroll down to see my process!

  1. First I use a pencil to draw my motive on a plain paper. I usually just pull a paper from my printer, so it doesn’t have to be a fancy paper.

  2. When I’m done with my sketch I reach for my light table so that I can see my motive through my water color paper.

  3. I add my black outlines, using a water based pigment that does NOT smudge when water is added on top of it. The pen in the picture is a Bimoji Fude Pen, Extra fine.

  4. The reason why I use a light table and do my sketching on a separate paper is so that I don’t have to erase my pencil lines from the original paper.

 

Wen I have all the outlines the way I want them, I start painting. I’m using watercolors from Zig Kuretake. They are called Gansai Tambi and they are SO LOVELY.

The pigmentation is amazing and you can get a very opaque result with these colors. Some say that they are almost a hybrid between watercolors and the more covering one: Gouache.

I have a box with 100 different colors, and it’s almost like they all behave in different ways depending on their pigmentation. If you wanna try Gansai Tambi, I would recomend you to get the box with 24 colors as a starter. The box is beautiful and it will be a nice feature on your desk.

I always mix my colors with water in a blending palette.
For my fist layer I use a lot of water so that the colors are a bit faded.
As you can see on the green leaf with the pink flower, I’m using the “wet on wet” technique to get different green variations in my leaf. But you can also see on the picture next to it that i’m using “wet on dry” to add a sharper line.
I really like adding small details on top when my first layers has dried. I often use another shade of the same color, or i use the same color with less water so that it turns darker.

 
 

When all the colors are in the right place, I add all the small little details with my fineliners.
Here I use a Zig Mangaka. When it has dried you can add water onto it without it smudgeing.
For me this is the best part! It really makes a big difference to the result.

Thank you for reading! I hope you are inspired.

List of stuff i used:

Karin OhlssonBahKadisch AB1 Comment