"OH HONEY" WATERCOLOUR ILLUSTRATION

Hello! Before I talk about this drawing here I just want to mention that I'm going camping for 4 days starting tomorrow so I won't be active at all or posting until I get back. Now onto this piece here!

I have been so busy this summer and especially in these last couple of weeks. A few days ago I got my first free day all to myself! I had two full days to do whatever I wanted. So since I felt like I hadn't done any proper finished work lately I decided to do a watercolour piece.

I've really been falling in love with the colour yellow so I wanted to make this a very yellow based piece.

I started out by planning the piece. I tried out some different colour combinations and techniques.

Then I started on the sketch. I had some trouble getting the pose quite right so it took me a couple tries. I used a reference picture that I took of myself in that pose.

Taking reference photos of yourself is always so weird! And I always draw in comfy clothing so I don't look the best.

I wanted to incorporate an actual bee in the piece to go with the honey combs so I gave her a bee necklace.

I often draw flowers behind a lot of my characters to fill the space and because flowers are pretty. I wanted some neutral coloured flowers so that it wouldn't clash with all the yellow so I picked these white lilies which even had a bit of yellow in them to match.

After the rough sketch I use a kneaded eraser to soften the lines and go over them again to clean them up. I always use a 0.3 lead pencil because I like how clean and thin I can make the lines.

For this piece I wanted to make sure that the yellow colour would really pop against her skin so I went ahead and covered the honey combs and the bee in miskit to make sure those spots don't get any other colours on them.

I lay down the background colour which I chose to use a warm saturated orangish yellow. I wanted it to be really solid.

Then I put down the colours for her. I tried to get the colours to be fairly dark but it was a little hard to do.

After I coloured the skin I removed the miskit, unfortunatly the miskit removes a little bit of the pigment from the pencil so I have to go over the honey combs again.
Then I colour in the honey combs. The pictures here are a little darker since I took them later in the day and the lighting wasn't the best.

Since I had a hard time getting the colours to layer and get darker escpecially since I was working with darker colours so my mom suggested I finish it with coloured pencils.

I always get nervous doing this because watercolour paper is so grainy but I gave it a try and I think I might be doing it for all of my pieces now!

This piece took me 2 whole days but I'm really happy with how it turned out!

I hope you enjoyed!