"Day Three - The Ray Project"

If you made it to this stage you are ready to have some fun and really breathe life into your painting. We start by adding the initial darks to the glass lenses being careful not to cover up all the highlights that you color blocked on the drawing. After this stage you may want to remove your pencil lines from the watercolor paper with a gum eraser. (I tend to leave the pencil lines on most of my paintings, it doesn't bother me to let people know I drew that piece). You can also see that we have added the first darks to the left side of the face, the mouth, lips and under the glasses. The depth on the hair is graduated washes and you gain the illusion of hair without actually painting each individual strand. I darken up the background behind the head to make the highlight appear stronger. Remember you can't have a highlight without a dark - first rule of painting. At this stage you have given your subject, life and movement and it only gets better from here. We start planning ahead from this stage on whether we are going to add other colors to our subject or stay mainly with a 2 color palette. Work to get your piece to this stage and we will really make some progress tomorrow as we make the final push to finish your masterpiece. Remember if it's not fun for you don't do it. Enjoy!