Stretching? Watercolor? Oh my!

I've been very busy lately and it was hard to get any work done, although I did manage to finish up a few incomplete sketches. You've already seen the previous sketches for the comic short "Fair Game", and the next thing would be to add paint, right? No.
I use 90 lb. watercolor paper, which means that it needs to be stretched. I didn't want to mess up on my nice sketched page, so I made a "test sketch" to see how the process would work. Turned out to be a small little project of its own.

For this test run, I quickly drew something up on a piece of watercolor paper, stretched it out on a board, holding it down with brown gummy tape, and let it dry overnight. After it had dried, I put masking fluid on the characters so I could work on the background first.


Here I'm just filling in some color where the masking fluid had taken it off.

I decided to use my Faber-Castell ink pens to outline everything at the end. Some details were missing and some areas the watercolor had gone over the ink so I had to re-ink some small areas. And I don't really know why I put a blue shirt there. I just couldn't figure out what else to put there to occupy that space. So I think I filled it in to practice fabric coloring.

I had started this little project with no idea how it was going to go. I was just careful and treated it as any other art piece.

And here's the final piece before I tore off the masking tape and cut out the finished piece from the gummy tape.

Next time I'll hopefully have some real pages finished and posted here for you to see. But until then, I'll just grab some sleep.

For the finished image, just visit my deviantART page! GO NOW!!