Evolution of a painting

this post is in response to a few friends asking what my process is in regards to my watercolor paintings.  Hope this helps a bit.  The process really depends on the imagery that I choose...  If it's something more illustrative like this piece I mostly use alot of washes and just build up the colors in layers instead of using say solid colors with fades in between or fade outs, etc... 







Start off with the outline. You can use anything from markers to pens, to brushes. Just make sure if you are using pen/ink that it's waterproof/permanent... then the fun begins with the watercolors

 black and grey fades/washes

multiple shades of 3 colors layered in washes.

 skin tone, multiple layers of a wash, darkening the mixture as i go

 add background

Coffee wash background.  Personally I like to just way over saturate the paper with big blotchy areas of coffee, let it dry, and then go back over the whole thing to smooth it out a little.  You get some pretty nice textures out of it that way.