Watercolor Drawings

I've been getting into watercolor drawings more recently; acrylic paintings have caused too much trouble and taken up a lot of my time in the past, so watercolor seemed like a fun medium to try. The process for most of these drawings started off with exploring some ideas of what I wanted to draw and finding tutorials on simple sketches for watercolor. These drawings were made using a reference photo so I was practicing more realistic drawings. For some of the portions on the drawing I wanted brighter and pigmented, I used some acrylic paint mixed with water to highlight those features. When using the watercolors, I would layer on a base color on the entire drawing that I felt matched the tone of all the colors, as well as a color in the final piece. This gave the drawing a coherent look, as they all had the same base color.

Chocolate Sprinkle Donut

This was a chocolate donut that has an assortment of sprinkled on the top. I tried to show depth with the direction and position of the sprinkles, as they are supposed to indicate the curved feature of the donut. The sprinkled were done using acrylic paint. I left some of the sketch lines to give it a fluid look. Overall, I felt this drawing was more abstract and didn't replicate the look of a donut, but I still like the style and use of watercolors.

Cactus Potted Plant

For the cactus plant, I added some highlights to the round pot and the leaves of the cactus. The base color for this drawing was a dull, muted blue-gray with some hints of green, so it was interesting to build that color into the greens of the leaves. The leaves were done with fluid and long sketch lines, and the overall piece looks similar to the reference.

Flower and Branch Wreath

This drawing was a mix of flower doodling, hand-lettering, and watercolors. I learned how to draw different flowers and branches that I used to fill this flower wreath. Watercolor was used to add splashes of color, indicating a light source through the white splotches that were not colored. The hand-lettering done in the middle was just cursive with the addition of thicker lines to give the look of a calligraphy pen. I added a small bee at the top to make the phrase "bee" happy. Its a cute watercolor piece that can be turned into an embroidery as well.

Paper Flower

This was a flower drawn from reference, and the tutorial I used didn't do any sketching beforehand. The strokes of the branches and leaves were fluid, so there wasn't a need to plan them out exactly. Layering the colors on the flowers to show the depth of the buds was challenging. The addition of some line art around the flower and to make addition leaves was an interesting style that I like and found that it brought some contrast between the colors.

Rubber Duck

This bath toy was another fun drawing. Because of the shape of the duck, finding the highlights and shadows was challenging without bright lights to define them properly. While the shape of my duck didn't come out as expected, I liked the look of the thick paint and the shadows on the duck.

Using watercolor can be challenging, as it takes a light hand to make sure you aren't overpowering the drawing with a color. I found it to be a fun medium to create fluid drawings, so be sure to try out some watercolor drawings. I have also created digital art versions of all these watercolor drawings and posted them on my Redbubble shop here so be sure to check out the designs on some products if you are interested.