Art Tutorial #1 - Mermaid Painting Walk-through
by Kirstin Mills
<< When inspiration for an artwork first strikes, the first step is to quickly sketch out a tiny version so the idea doesn't skip away. Once this idea is nailed down, a proper sketch can be done. I usually work directly onto my painting surface, keeping my pencil strokes light. This painting, like most of my artworks, is created on highest quality 300gsm Smooth Arches Watercolour paper, which is a beautiful surface to use with watercolour paint. The heavier your paper the better it will hold lots of water...and there will be lots! You can see here that I've taped the paper to a board with normal masking tape (you can use other methods of fastening your paper to a hard, flat surface, but I like this one best). The board protects whatever surface I'm working on because I don't always paint in the same place and the tape helps to hold the paper still and flat while I paint on it.
In the image to the left you can see that I have already inked in the butterflies using a black Indian ink. These are monarch butterflies, so I wanted to establish their strong markings early. The mermaid herself and the rock she leans on have been inked in a Sepia ink. Notice that I have not drawn in ink any horizon lines or waves or any of the water. I wanted to keep these areas soft and natural-looking for when I paint them later. After inking I have applied a masking fluid (or Frisket) to the areas I don't want to get paint on when I do the next step (which is very messy!).
The next step is to start applying paint. I work mostly from tubes of paint, as I can squeeze them out onto my palette (seen on the left of the photo) and mix them as I go. You can also work from pans, which are just as good and can often be a bit more handy than tubes.
To paint the sky, which I want to have a sunset or sunrise sort of feeling, I mix various shades of Blue, Red and Yellow in my palette, making sure to have plenty of paint ready to go: you don't want to stop in the middle of a wash to mix more! Then taking a big, soft brush made of natural fibres, I wet the top half of my paper: the area I want the paint to go in. Then slightly holding my board at an angle to help the paint run down rather than pool, I run large, generous strokes from left to right moving downwards from the top of the painting and taking care to catch up the run from the last stroke in my next. As I go down the page I gradually move from a purpley-blue to red to yellow, being careful to blend gradually. This is all done in one big hit: any stopping or drying or redoing will result in a messy wash and an uneven tone. The best way to go about this step is just to let go and have fun! Paint with strong colours, remembering that colours tend to fade as they dry.
<< After the sky is painted, I turn to the sea. I often like to paint the background before the figure to give it a sense of place and to establish the colour scheme and lighting. I'm leaving the masking fluid on at this stage.
The sea is great fun to paint: the rough tips of crashing waves allow for a lot of expression and freedom. Taking a soft, medium-sized brush and working with hues of blue and green, I loosely sketch in the colour of the waves, leaving blank patches of paper showing through in areas where there is foam, like against the rocks and on the surface of the water where the foam breaks and stretches over the crests of the waves. It can help to look at references such as photos (or real waves if you're near them) at this stage to get it just right. It's not too important at this stage to make it look perfect: I'm just sketching it out to get the feel and movement of the waves. I will fill them out with deeper hues and more definition later.
TIP: In the last photo you can just see the part of a crumpled tissue in the bottom right edge of the frame: never paint without one! Some clean tissues and clean water are absolute staples when painting with watercolours: they can easily mop up mistakes, dilute heavy colours, remove excess water from a brush and generally make your painting experience a lot easier!
>>You can see that in this next photo I have defined the waves with some heavier colour (more paint, less water) and some shading in the troughs between waves. You will also notice that the waves and foam become less defined as they recede into the distance. This is because as objects get further away they lose definition, intensity of colour and tend to melt into one another more than close up objects (just look at some distant mountains or a city horizon compared to your immediate surroundings to see this happening). I've also started to add some extra splashes on top of the waves with some white gouache. I do this to create some splashes that are cleaner and sharper than the white areas I have left already. Dragging gouache quickly across a dry surface with a brush in the direction the splash is moving creates the misty, splash effect you can see starting to happen on the right side of the rock.
And then comes my favourite step! When the paint is completely dry I can pull off the masking fluid! Apart from the fact that this is just fun to do, I love revealing the clean white surface underneath that I now get to paint!
<< Once all the masking fluid is removed, I use some yellow and red paint to fill in the colours on the butterflies' wings. While they dry I take a blue hue and paint in the shape and contours of the rock, applying more paint in the shadow areas, such as around the base and under the mermaid. You can see this step in the inset.
After the blue paint is dry, I take some purple and follow the shadows again to give them a warmer depth and bring the rock out a bit more from the background. Slight shades of green are also applied in some areas, to suggest the wet rock reflecting a green-blue ocean, and then a general wash of a yellowy-brown colour such as Yellow Ochre is applied to make the rock more earthy. The seaweed, starfish and shells on the rock are also painted in at this stage.
You may also notice a slight purple colour to the mermaid's skin tone in this photo. This is the first part of a great way to achieve life-like skin tone. If you look at your own skin, you will notice that it is not a flat colour, but is made up of lots of translucent layers: you can see hints of the blue and red from underlying veins and tissue through the surface. The first step in painting this is to fill in the shadow areas with a cooler tone such as a blue or purple. You can see that the shadows get deeper underneath the mermaid's hair and chin. Take care to soften the edges of shadows by blending out with clean water.
>> The next step in creating lush skin tone is to shade in the skin contours with a red colour such as Rose Dore or Rose Madder. Make sure the underlying layers are dry first. You will notice that over the top of the blue layer, this red layer begins to give depth to the shadow areas. Less colour is applied to highlighted areas, or areas where the light hits most, such as the tops of the mermaid's shoulders and the sides of her torso. I have also applied more colour to areas where the light shines partly through the skin, making it semi-translucent, such as the fingers and ears. If you hold your hand over a strong light source, you will notice the same effect in yourself. Similarly, I have added more colour to flushed areas such as the mermaid's cheeks, and areas where the skin is thicker or bunched, such as her elbows and the arch of her back. You can see that with the red tone added, the body starts to take on a much more realistic effect.
<< Once this stage is dry, I begin to paint the scales of her tail and her top in. On the mermaid's top you will notice the similar technique to the last steps of applying darker shades, or thicker paint, to the shadow areas, and letting some of the white paper show through lighter layers of paint in the highlight areas. This creates a sense of shape and roundness.
The tail was initially painted with a small brush in tight, careful scales. When they were all finished however, they looked too flat and controlled and not very natural, so the gaps in between were filled out with a wash of the same colour. This is a good lesson in washing over thick areas of paint...they run when you add more water! I lost a lot of the definition I had created in individual scales, and you can see parts of both in the tail to the left.
>> After creating a blotted, flat colour in the tail in the last step, I took a clean brush with some clean water and used careful strokes to lift some colour back off the paper, to add some highlight and shape to the tail. In the picture on the right, this looks very rough and unfinished, but will be softened out when I re-add some scale detail later.
I have also started to paint the hair. Initially I just use a yellow colour to suggest where the highlights and shadows are. You can see more detail in the inset. To paint the hair I always pull my brush in the direction of hair growth, letting the stroke taper at the end until it lifts from the paper. My brush stroke is fullest where the hair is in shadow, and tapers away to nothing where the hair begins to move into light. When the hair is curling, twisting or moving over or under itself as hair does, try to think about how the light hits each piece. It will be different depending on the angle of the hair as it curls.
You will also notice that I haven't painted each individual strand of hair: to do so would create a bird's nest or a haystack effect on the poor mermaid's head! When we look at human hair, or animal hair, from even a slight distance away, our eye catches not each individual hair, but rather parts of hair, or groups such as you can see in the photo on the right. Individual curls, strands or 'fly-aways' can be added around the edges of the hair so that it is not a flat block.
<< When the first layer of hair is dry, I darken it with a golden brown colour, working from the shadows out and not dragging my stroke as far as I did with the yellow. This helps the brown to blend with the yellow and push the highlights to the surface away from the shadows and fold of the hair. This extra layers of colour adds depth and shine to the hair: nobody's hair is ever just one colour. Hair changes according to where the light hits it and what colours it reflects. The darker golden brown colour also serves to bring the hair out into a better relationship with the colours surrounding it: its tones match the yellowy-oranges in the butterflies' wings and some of the shells and starfish on the rock. I have also painted in the hair decoration details and further defined the mermaid's eyebrows and facial features, adding some freckles along her cheekbone, tinting the blue of her eye, flushing her lips with a scarlet colour (careful to keep the edges soft and not like harsh lipstick) and touching up her eyelashes to be a bit darker.
You can also see that I've added some more scales to the tail. I waited until it had dried completely and then used quite thick, almost undiluted watercolour paint to layers some crisp scales over the top, working them in more lightly over the highlighted areas so that they were less sharp and unnatural. You can see that this effect gives the tail a wet, reflective shine look as the sea water drips off it.
A crucial step in the skin painting was only now completed. There is no reason to wait this long when doing it: in fact it is better to complete this step straight after the red tone has dried. I only waited this long because while the skin was drying I began painting something else and got carried away! The final step for magical, realistic skin tone is to add, after the purpley-blue and the red, a light wash of a golden-brown colour such as Yellow Oxide. This anchors the reds and purples you have created into a more uniform skin tone and gives the skin the glow and natural "skin colour" that many people try to achieve with a flat brown colour alone.
The last step in the painting is to add the water spray and splashes with white gouache. I had to wait until the very end of the painting to do this because the spray will be on top of all the other layers, especially around the rock and the mermaid's tail. Using white gouache, I brush up and away from the waves as they crash against the rock and mermaid, and I spatter some paint around the tops with an old toothbrush to suggest the sea spray flying in the air. And then she's done! The next picture is the finished and scanned artwork: see what a difference scanning makes compared with bad photography!
>> See the finished painting <<
Please note: All text, design and graphics on this page are copyright Kirstin Mills and may not be published, redistributed or copied without permission.
