Have you ever taken a few late-night progress photos then looked through them to get the clearest and best one, then wake up in the morning and thin “how on earth did I take such a blurry picture”? This, my friends, is that picture:
I don’t even know. A newborn lamb could take a steadier picture than this. Oh well. This is the watercolor under painting and the beginning of one of the windows. I say under painting but in truth the back wall was destined to be much darker than that. Just didn’t want to waste the paint. Oh, the paint, by the way, is Cotman watercolor with a bit of Graham gouache near the end stages.
This is about where I got to with my developing watercolor skills. I deemed it not terrible and put it away for the day… Only for it to plague me to the point of distraction, ultimately ending in my taking out all my paint gear at bedtime and breaking out the gouache.
And this was the results of the gouache phase (which I thought was going to end in disaster as things often do when me and gouache get together). Then, at the eleventh hour (actually it was about 10:00pm) I decided to change his shirt color. But that would have certainly led to failure, so I put in the Hunchback of Notre Dame to observe a cartoon stained glass rendering (I don’t have internet at home at the moment and you be surprised at how much it helps not to!). After rolling through half the movie I pulled out the watercolors once more.
Stained Glass Dragon 10in x 10in – watercolor, gouache and graphite on soft press watercolor paper
And we have about the final rendering. It’s at the point where no matter how much paint I add, it looks about the same. If anything else is to be done with this, it’ll be digitally rendered. All-in-all though, I’d consider this my best over all watercolor project since I started using the medium.
One thing I’ve learned for next time: Despite their brilliant light-giving quality, stained glass windows are darker than one would think with extremely rich color. I was afraid to go as dark as I needed to at the beginning, but now I know for future reference.
