PAINT FIRST, THEN DRAW

James Gurney shows how you can use drawing tools over a watercolor or gouache painting to add lines, details and texture

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The strategy for building a picture is typically to draw it out first and then paint over the drawing. Many artists work out all the details in pencil lines or pen lines at the beginning, and then put their dry media aside and shift to wet paint, adding colors either transparently or opaquely. But with watercolor or gouache you can flip that sequence, doing the painting first and then crafting a detailed drawing on top of the dry paint, because the matte surface is receptive to most drawing media. With this method, the early stages can be big, splashy, loose, or exploratory, followed by carefully considered lines and textures executed with dry media. Here are some examples of this quirky technique, which is sometimes called "overdrawing."

CREATING AN ANTIQUE PHOTO LOOK

The goal with this tiny plein air sketch is to simulate the look of an antique photo by combining warm and cool gray tones with brown pen lines. I start with a light underdrawing in graphite pencil and then place the big light and shadow planes with a relatively large flat synthetic brush. The only pure white is the central building. For the final linework I use a fountain pen with brown ink. Since the brown ink is water-soluble, I can't add further watercolor washes without dissolving the lines.

ADDING ONLY THE LINES YOU NEED