This Watercolor Took Several Days

It's nice when you can finish a project in one day, but it doesn't always happen that way.

This one, the cover image of the Piker Press to accompany Ndaba Sibanda's story "The Escape Route in the Dark," began with the part with the man's head near the bottom.

Following through with admonitions to let everything dry, I skipped to the form of the woman, the skulls and skeletons, the cows' heads, the bees.

I let the work stew for a day, then added the colored brush strokes, all with the same brush you saw in the previous post. (I love it!)

In the next step, I taped the picture to my watercolor board on the tabletop easel, and wet the paper in the bottom right corner; the picture was taped up so that the colored pigment would flow to that corner. When that was dry enough to stop flowing, I brought the paper into the house to dry in the furnace's warmth.

Finally, I used my Pilot V7 pen to outline each brushstroke, with a Staedtler .1 pen for the really tiny bits in the smallest skeleton. From there we were Photoshop-bound to add in the black background.

Now the original resides in my scrapbook, protected by tracing paper. I'm thinking I'd like to add the black background in ink, and then frame it under glass. Time will tell. I was pleased with the result.