Marta Lebre Art

Watercolors has always been a medium very challenging for me. It was after a few masterclasses and seeing friends approaching it in a relaxed wat, that I was finally drawn to it.

Although they're not in any professional level, I do love how relaxed and soft I've managed to create them, and so, here's some of my favorites watercolors dating back from 2018. Enjoy!

My room in Ireland in 2018.

Some studies from a visit to Dublin's Botanical Garden.

My kitchen at night in Lisbon.

A river beach in Santarém.

Back in December of 2022, I was searching for more ways to get inspired to draw more. While looking back at why I stopped doing art regularly, I came to the conclusion I was hesitant with how I deal with color, light and shadows. It's been a struggle of mine for a while now and a simple illustration took a lot more time to paint as I spent the majority of it correcting and trying to get the light and shadow right.

On the search for tutorials on how to better deal with color, I stumbled across LightPonderings youtube channel and his step by step color studies challenges.

Here are some studies of my own, the goal is to draw the best you can (lights, darks, form, etc) from a picture or still life in 30 min.

Also a quick video of the process because these are always fun:

I started out with small objects with simple backgrounds to make it easier. Making this everyday with a timer is the smart way to go about this exercise, when I look back at the classes I took - either for illustration or anatomy drawing - we always made a sketching exercise very similar to this. With digital painting and a portable tablet like an Ipad, you can cover a lot of colors in a small amount of time.

There's a gif of Korra that's been going around tumblr of her doing circular movements from the last episode. I needed the inspiration so I drew some poses of that epic animation. 

A quick sketch done with pencil that I decided to color later on photoshop.