Skins

Watercolour

This painting was a nightmare, and having done it, if I could go back in time and do it another way, I would. The concept was to show lots of people in lots of different skin tones, each one just a shade darker than the one before, to demonstrate that there is really no difference between races.
In case anyone was thinking of doing something similar, here's the mistakes I made so you can avoid them.
The logical process to me seemed to be that I simply block them after each wash. I had no tape that was low-tack enough to safely do this (having scrapped the first attempt because I tried it with a low-tack adhesive tape and ripped layers off the page) so I went with paper shapes which could just sit there, being held down by hand. Great theory, but when the paint touched the edge of the paper, capillary action pulled paint into areas I wanted to be kept free of paint. After about the second row I only used my cut-outs as a guide.
Also note: 190 GSM paper is not meant to handle 23 layers of watercolour paint, no matter how gentle you are. I was careful to let the page dry between layers, but by about 12 layers, the surface of the image was starting to abrade.

This painting took roughly three days of stopping and starting, and is probably the hardest piece I've ever painted.