This is the beautiful mother of my boyfriend. On the occasion of her last birthday we browsed through a pile of family photos because we wanted to digitize these memories to keep them safe. While having a lot of fun looking through baby photos, this picture caught my attention.
The original photo was taken ca. 1986 on a vacation in Italy.
The composition of the picture, the colours, the background, the dress and of course the elegant posture of my boyfriends mother were enough reasons for me to take out my sketchbook. And in any case she is an inspiring woman. #femineart
This time I tried a different painting process because I wanted to find a way to be precise referring to the shapes but also be able to concentrate on the colours of the painting. That’s why this process includes three different steps. This sounds a bit complicated but it was a very good thing for me. And a bonus is you will get two illustrations out of one. Attention marketing vocab: Paint one get one free. 😉
How does this look like?
Gouache painting in three steps
Step #1
Draw an illustration using the scanned original photo and a software like Adobe Illustrator. This takes time but in the end you’ll get a precise, editable and of course a complete illustration. I think this is very motivating.
Step #2
If you are happy with all the contours use black outlines, change the filling colour to white and print it out. Use this template to transfer the outlines to the paper you want use for your gouache painting. I used graphit transfer paper from AMI.
Step #3
Have fun colouring in!
P.S.: Use washi tape to get a clean border.
If you want to see more like this, take a look at the post of the gouache painting inspired by my mother. ♥
Here I proudly present my or better to say our 😉 (a lot of credit goes to J. G.) first time lapse video. Have fun watching!
