A book of watercolor drawings {Process Post}

I have been stressing a lot about work lately as you know I keep ranting about haha. So I decided to spend some time to disconnect digitally on those days where I feel completely exhausted and slowly filled out a watercolor book! I was pretty awkward about sharing it since I am honestly really bad at traditional art and I wasn't sure if I will actually finish the book, but it is actually done!

Some notes:

• I found this book in my closet and idk where I got it but it's the perfect size for small mini drawings.

• To keep myself stress free as this is the purpose of doing some disconnecting from the digital space, I limited myself to one color each page max

• The characters in this book are comfort characters so nothing really complex or ground breaking and a lot of them use similar poses to previous work. I just want to have fun with it~!

Materials

These are the core materials I used, its not all of them but some!

• Moleskine Art Watercolor Album 3.5" x 5.5" 60 Pages, its amazing and it holds water well and the pen feels smooth on it

• Watercolor Pan I mooched from Hyde so I do not know what brand are the colors inside it

• Pilot Calligraphy pen (I will never use this again for watercolor, it makes the ink bleed)

• Sakura Micron Pigma liners (.005) (.02) (.05). Personally .02 is the holy grail liner and I used it for 90% of the inking

• Faber Castell Sepia liner S; I used this for accent and its a really lovely soft color

• No brand paintbrush. This was a mistake, it's a really bad brush that is hard for precision painting but I was too lazy to look for another paintbrush haha.

Learnings

I have a lot of fun doing this book and I am looking for another watercolor book to start another project! Maybe not as restrictive as one color only but more of a casual one where it is ok to not have a theme. I admit it is really satisfying to see it come together and at first I only did a couple of drawings at a time but after the halfway point where I realized that I can finish this book, I drew more often on it!

I did learn a few things from this experience!

• I still have NOT find a good white permanent marker for mistakes. I tried using this one but it is rather weak. In the future I want to purchase a stronger white pigment for correction, but one where allows watercolor to be layered on top of it.

• I have a tube of old gold mixing paint. I think the brand is kurakake but please do not take my word for it! It's really fun to squeeze a couple of drops onto your watercolor to create a shimmering gold ink feel. One tube of this can last you a literal lifetime.

• I made a lot of little mistakes throughout. I was pretty tired that night and this one drawing was a bit messy and I inked the wrong line! I want to give up at this point since I knew the white permanent marker is not very strong but Hyde told me a tip he learned about using pieces of paper to cover your mistakes. So I cut out a piece of white cardstock and glue it over the troubled area and pretend it didn't exist haha

• On this drawing, you can see how the calligraphy pen sorta melted into the background when I put water on it! In the future I will take more care to test the water solubility of the inks first. The calligraphy pen was really good at filling areas of black but I need to avoid using it in areas where there will be water.

Misc

And before I sign out for the day, here are some random stuff I saved such as pencil sketches before inking and my watercolor testing station! I hope you enjoy this little read and have a lovely day. (btw, I am feeling a lot better and A LOT less stress now) ^ u^