WALKTHROUGH/TECHNIQUE: Painting a Tiny Wasp

Hello, my friends,

I took a few process photos while painting this wasp and while the quality of the nighttime phone photos is not the best, I wanted to share all the same. Let me know if you would like more quick technique posts like this!

This was a painting I kind of "built as I went" so the wasp here was not initially planned.  Using a firm, Taklon scrubber brush, I scrubbed up some of the paint from my surface and sketched the wasp in using mechanical pencil.

I began the painting process by blocking in a few basic shadows and highlights using a mixture of Pthalo blue with a bit of bright yellow added in to create a variety of tones on the wasp's body.

I then began adding in  some of the finer details.  Most of this phase was done with 20/0 brush with a nice fine tip though I do use an old 10/0 throughout as well for the larger areas, and softening of some of the fine details.

Using white gouache, I added in a few highlights to areas of the exoskeleton.

Finally, I added wing details and a few extra hues from the surrounding piece's palette to the wasp's body in order to help her better mesh with her environment.  I also smoothed out some of the details to make them a little less harsh and sharp.   This is an ultra closeup showing her about 3 times bigger than she is and it gives you a good idea of how bumpy the textures on my watercolour ground prepped surfaces can be!  This bumpy texture makes the surface more absorbent than smooth prepped surface would be which allows me to layer much more easily.  As always, I prepped the surface with two layers of Daniel Smith Titanium White watercolour ground and one later of QoR watercolour ground using a sponge to create the texture. 

Thanks for looking!  

Be well~
~Aria