Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.
Planning “The Little Spider”
I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.
I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.
Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).
Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.
Coloring Little Spider
Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.
My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.
Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.
Patience?
I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.
That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.
This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.
My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.
This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.
