Critique: Watercolor figures

Did some watercolors figures and all critiques are welcomed. Should I add another color to make the figures more interesting? Also, any recommendation on books or resources about watercolor and gouache? I just realized I don't have books or references that focuses on watercolor and gouache.

https://imgur.com/a/c3I9BQ9

• JO NI edited this post on June 9, 2024 6:05pm.

I definitely love your focus on clear and crisp shapes. I think you have an incredible effective way to inform about shape and posture on a glance, and I think the silhouette is strong enough, that you could even scale them down to very tiny depictions without losing any of that message (That is not meant as an actual suggestion for you to do, just as a mark of quality, that you could do it.)

At the moment you are basically using blue as a substitute for black, staying in a digital mode. And I must totally admit, that I can't tell you much about truely dipping into multi-color, as I have been postponing that step time after time.

I occassionally took a look into tutorials, and it's just a whole new can of worms compared to "simply" drawing,, with local colors modified by the color of reflected lights, decisions about saturation and using greyscales to harmonize color composition, new forms of contrasts, emotional "meaning" of individual colors or specific combinations of colors, deciding about a unified palette of colors for diverse effects.... maybe I shouldn't have looked so closely into all of the possible aspects, because now I am scared.

One name I remember from a guy who does great work with gouache and explains his thoughts while doing so was James Guerney on youtube.

Thanks for the insight, I'll look into the person you mentioned.

Hello and welcome back, JO. Greatest job on your clearest and cleanest shapes, spaces, forms, and colors of your figure drawings. I think your shapes and silhouettes are strongest as they were and are and will be, so as to get out of being too bogged down on the littlest and smallest details. (Not that it's just the tiniest suggest, but mostly a quality that you can and will learn from)

Yet, I'm still not even getting enough of your most broadest but cartooniest humor and vitality in your designs and poses. Would and could you like to please loosen up your arms with 62 minutes of 2 minute figure studies, all done from your dominant and non-dominant arms, and all flipped horizontally?

The reason why is because your edges can and will become the most analytical but fully intuitive in your thought process of observation and caricature and exaggeration in your graphic shapes and lines. So if you wanna see most info, may I suggest you look into some most latest videos from Love Life Drawing? They have lots of keenest stuff for art and life. Thank you🙏🏼.