Dealing with the problem of smudging by changing mediums August 10, 2024 10:54
I was having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to fix my colored pencil work on watercolor. I couldn't stand the toxic stench of the sprays and don't have a garage or whatever to do it in. I tried some other ways of fixing but ended up negatively affecting the watercolor layer.
So I decided that I had to try using paint. I started with the house on the left side with the highly slanted roof. I'd already done the entire house in colored pencil but began going over it with gouache. Since I started with the roof, which was already about lines, I used a small round and mixed up my gouache with a bit of zinc and a small amount of water to end up with a creamy paint that would tend to skip over the paper's texture. I think used a couple different values ang one other color to create the shading, mostly by doing lines, almost like in engraving. I also used drybrush scumbling to create shadows. You can see this in more detail on the product page (click on the image there to get a lot of detail).
This has worked pretty well for me. I do miss the scumbling granularity I can get with colored pencil, but using the paint in a scratchier way does give me some of that.