The fireplace in watercolor

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My first version of the fireplace in gouache struck me as dreary and too tiresome for a children’s book, so I did it over in watercolor thinking I’d liven it up. I used my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette for the first time. Even though this palette will allegedly mix 60 bazillion colors, I managed to mix only two, a dark gray for the inside of the fireplace, and an off-white for the bricks. Plus, I photoshopped the bejezuz out of this image to change the color of the wall using a linear burn mask. In other words, this image doesn’t look anything like the original watercolor. I’m fine with that.

Note to self: Muji gel pens run like crazy with watercolor, but they don’t run with Copic markers.

Even though I’ve looked at this fireplace thousands of times, I couldn’t draw it accurately from memory. I used a photo reference for this version.

The villain enters the story

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The fireplace and its chimney are the villains of my story. I needed a model for this character, so I talked my fireplace into posing. My fireplace is actually used for storing my overflow books, but for simplicity’s sake I decided to leave them out.

I’ve been painting for the last week using only the Zorn palette and I like the restrictions it places on me. Since I’m just learning about color mixing, working with only three colors and black and white is actually liberating. These few colors have become almost comforting, whereas my bigger palette with 32 colors is scary.