Room Full of Birds - Ink, Paper, String

This Halloween cat illustration in the sketchbook was pretty quick and dirty, but turned out really nicely for what was a quick one-hour exercise. It also feels great to get seasonal in my new workspace, even if I’m still technically settling in!

In the mornings this week, I’ve been painting over both pages of my little watercolor sketchbook. It’s chilly and blustery outside, and I’m feeling cooped up. Maybe that’s why I got inspired by some birds in cages by Tiwanese illustrator Chia-Chi Yu and decided to fill up the entire space with expressive, colorful caged birds. I like my inspiration material much better. She does amazing things with mixed media and collage that I wish I could, but I also like this page of the sketchbook, which turned out nice and colorful and not too fussy.

I also remembered to take process photos!

I started with the darkest areas and the most vibrant areas picked out.

To play nicely with the bright red, I kept the blues desaturated (adding gray) and included plenty of neutral colors and some pastels.

I continued to add detail with gouache and a fine brush. Instead, I wish I had used a different medium, like colored pencil.

Heck yeah. Except… There are actually stages of this underpainting that I like better than the finished version. Which is nice, in a way. Now when I want to do an exercise like this again, I’m going to try stopping with one layer of paint, and add the details with something like colored pencil instead.

Still, I want to make more pages of my sketchbook like this one, with color side-to-side!