[iTalent round 4] Mermaid watercolor pencil drawing | Mermaid Monday #6

Finding my creativity back

When I was a little girl my favorite thing to do was: draw. I loved being in my own world, just being creative. I remember that sometimes I could even be busy making arts out of candy. All the happy colours gave me inspiration to make something out of nothing. In school I always had high grades for artistic classes like drawing. I could draw all kinds of things, even imaginary worlds. I loved being creative with pencils and markers. But I must admit, that for years I did not draw at all. At the most I was doodling something while waiting on the phone when I was put on hold. But I didn't even know the term doodling until recently.

I got inspired by looking at work from other artists

On the platform where I was blogging a year ago, I saw many post of people that made awesome drawings or paintings. Looking at them made me want to start being creative again. So I started with buying myself a small sketching book and some markers and colours. I made a terrible mistake picking the sketching book, as the paper was not suited for the markers that I bought. But I did not just give up, and started making some things anyway. When I started my steemit journey in June 2017, these drawings were the first things I shared here. And I was ecstatic when people upvoted them. Steemit was all new to me, and I did not know how things actually worked. So if this would mean that I could earn money by doing what I love (being creative) and get rewarded on Steemit by other members, that sounded great!

These were the drawings and the start of my Steemit-journey almost a year ago!
Drawing of an Elephant mandala style
Cat drawing mandala style
Owl drawing mandala style

And here you can find them as a gif image:

But now I have discovered watercolor pencils

I read about them after I saw an amazing piece of art somewhere. Never heard of watercolor pencils before this moment, so I watched a video with tutorial and asked for advice which pencils I should buy. I got the advice to buy Faber-Castell pencils, as they are always good according to her. So I went to the shop and bought some colours I liked, not knowing what I was going to create first with them. So that's pretty hard deciding which colours to buy. I never used watercolour pencils before, but I am a big fan already! One tip: don't buy the cheap watercolour pencils if you are going to use them often, I tried to buy some cheaper ones, and they did not draw half as smooth as the Faber-Castell pencils.
So I would absolutely recommend these:

As you can see I use a brush, but I don't use the water inside the brush (If I do there's too much water pouring out at once). I use a little plastic cup instead. And as you can see the pencils are best to be sharpened with a knife. If you just try to sharpen them with a normal sharpener, they will break and not get sharp. Don't forget to put some absorbing tissues (you can use what you have available toilet paper or kitchen towels) next to your materials, because if you use thing paper (beginners mistake) like I did, you will see te the paper curling up when it's too wet. You can avoid some of the curling up by using an absorbing tissue or something.

The drawing and painting process

I am not a professional, and I always draw in the order that I feel like drawing, so don't expect to see the best used techniques and order of how-to start a drawing/painting. As I like to see the progress, I have made many pictures while I was drawing.. Unfortunately the light was not always as good as it was the picture moment before, sorry for that.. But as I have many pictures, I thought it would be the best to make a gif file compilation. This is one of the first eight pictures I made when I started drawing:

The next phase, some more colour:

And here she is: my entry for the iTalent contest and also for the Mermaid Monday contest, as I was obviously inspired by the mermaids I kept seeing in the weekly contest. I hope you enjoyed this post, and like my first finished drawing/painting with watercolor pencils.