^^Septic Ores^^

I don’t know if anyone here likes re:zero but I drew subaru and emilia ❄️

Hiya! Thanks for the question and the compliments :)

The first step to having smooth watercolors is the materials you use. I use the art creation sketchbooks, they’re very affordable and the paper stays flat! For watercolors I use the van gogh watercolors, they’re a bit on the expensive side but if you can get a set then it should be worth your money.

Second step is how your brushes and how much you wet the paper. I suggest looking up a video about this topic, try Casey golden or Kristin Van Leuven on youtube!

Lastly I’d like to tell you that the way I work with watercolors probably isn’t the professional way to do things but I still will tell you since you asked !

After I have my lineart (with a smudgeproof fineliner) I fill in big spaces with very watered down paint and I always keep a paper towel nearby to blot the paper if it gets too wet. With watercolor it’s important to work with the whites of the paper, because watercolor white doesn’t exist, if a watercolor pallete has white, that’s gouache, which is opague and it will cover up your other colors and lineart.

For creating shadows I will often use the same color but add some blue or orange, it depends on the setting I’m trying to achieve in the drawing. I take a step back and see where shadows are required and then use a very thin, fine brush (unless it’s a big shadow) to lay the darker color down. I then will blot the paper again and repeat step above until I’m satisfied with how dark it has become. Furthermore if you want to have a shadow that’s gradual (like a gradient) you lay your base color down but have it be more wet than normal, and then lay down the shadow color on the part you want dark, then blend them in the middle with your brush (sometimes they do it themselves because of the wetness of the paper, again, watch the Kristin Van Leuven videos on it!)

That’s all I can tell you at the moment! Just remember to use the whites of the paper and use color theory to create your shadow colors correctly! Look at references, it helps a lot.

Here’s a piece where I used all these techniques for reference :)