I wrote this tutorial up to lead you guys through a watercololor texture set. I don’t normally do this much detail or as bland composition, but I really want you guys looking at the textures and analyzing them. (That’s my excuse for a composition that didn’t have as much punch as I thought it would.)

I: My initial sketches, done in pencil and micron on the back of a library catalogue card. These individual drawings are probably an inch wide. Once I have that down, I do a quick tone study – not to follow, but just to look at when it gets muddied. And another study of the hand and cigarette, because hands are the easiest thing to fuck up.

II: My brushes. My materials for this operation are curtailed, because I have to do this entire piece in the school library to scan it incrementally. So nothing to imprint with texture, no masking fluid, nothing that I couldn’t throw in a bag at two second’s notice. (I carry brushes in a Chinese Bamboo placemat wrapped in a rubber band, I owe a huge debt to whoever had the idea first. It’s wonderful.) So a ½ inch Princeton Select flat brush for when the effect is needed, a 0 Princeton Select “Liner” Rigger brush (I use this brush way too often, because I work hella teeny) for linework and fur and dabs of color, a 3 Princeton Select Round brush for general purposes, a big-ass Utrecht watercolor brush for large areas and washes, and three others – all of them I don’t know the brands of – a stiff plastic children’s brush for distressing the wet paper for texture; a very limp, cheap brush for applying and lifting water from the pigment areas, and a sumi brush for when I need textured, highly fluid linework. The sumi brush and the plastic brush I don’t even think I used, but keep them in your kit. You never know when they’ll come up!
So, to sum up – flat for flat, a rigger for details and lines, a medium round for main purposes, a large for large washes, a stiff to distress the paper, a limp to manipulate the water, and a sumi for fluid lines. (Badger is recommended for the sumi. Use a variety of hairs in your sumi brushes when you use them with ink, but I highly recommend Badger for how well it takes to water.

III: My Palette. I work with a cheap ceramic palette and a set of tube watercolors – 16 or so. The key is to have multiples of each primary color, that way when you mix for secondaries, you have choices. (Also – try mixing your own neutrals. The white is invaluable, as you can diminish tone without diminishing saturation.)
When I feel experimental, I buy pans of watercolor – used – and use the grimy purples and browns that collect in the bottom of the pan. It’s impossible to mix them half as interesting. I had to mix my own purple for a sky of this scale – the upper right hand, you can see a small chunk with “Black,” Cobalt Grey, a miniscule dab of scarlet, violet, and ultramarine.

IV: I transfer the picture onto Bristol Board, after a great many erasings and reshufflings to get the composition right. (Even then, it never looks as good as the sketch.) Particular problems were the lump on the back of his head as he looks up, the angle of the left arm, the tilt of the legs, and getting his bolo to not compete with his breast pockets. Most of these I had to sadly concede.)

V: I pass an eraser over the pencil lines to lighten them, so the watercolor doesn’t fix the graphite to the paper. Following that, I apply the initial color to the sheet metal wall and roof and gutter. I begin with a brown layer for the roof to ground it against the primaries that’ll turn up elsewhere in the image. The sheet metal doesn’t need the grease and pock texture I planned to give it at a later stage, so I applied an initial coat of rippled lines, black at the sharp edges, since we’re viewing the corrugation from an angle. The part that reflects light to us will be the whitest, so that’ll be, roughly, the sides of the curves. I use the flat brush for this, mixing a cold cobalt with a lukewarm black (some French gray might do me well in future. I’ll note to buy a tube). The grease isn’t even, so different shades of the metal will reflect the gray and the black. You can’t do texture without understanding WHY the color reflects like this.
(part two once I get some sleep)