I had the great pleasure of doing a watercolour demo yesterday for the students of the Comics and Graphic Novels program at Camosun College, the same program I graduated from in 2013. We had a great time, with teacher Ken Steacy and I swapping off showing various watermedia.
I never manage to complete demo paintings in class, and usually they languish in a “to be finished someday” file, but I was really enjoying this one, and with no deadlines looming, decided to have a little playtime. I think I’ll be making a print of this one!
Mermaid Sprite — from a drawing I made last Inktober; I enlarged it quite a bit for the painting, traced it onto Opus Watermedia paper (my usual comics paper of choice) and inked it with a brush pen. Then it was time for watercolour, white acrylic ink, and a wee bit of coloured pencil.
UPDATE! Nov 4 — I just received these pics of the demo from Ken, and since the class gave me permission to post them, here they are!
Ken gave everyone a special treat by showing a short video documenting French comics artist François Schuiten as he made the announcement poster for the exhibition Machines à Dessiner in Musée des Arts et Métiers in 2016. Talk about a hard act to follow! The video’s only about 7 minutes long—treat yourself and click the link above.
Everybody was really attentive — I’m looking forward to seeing what these people come up with for watercolour comics!
Look over there! No, over there! I was laughing so hard at one point I could hardly paint!
After my demo, Ken took over and demonstrated gouache, several kinds of inks, and aniline dyes. It’s always fun watching him draw or paint — he makes it look so easy! This shot gives an idea of the scale of the room; it used to be a TV studio and is perfect for art activities, including life drawing. Having the big screen to show photos (and the aforementioned video) from a computer is really nice; I wish all my classrooms had that.
All the stuff I drag around for a demo! Ken snapped this pic afterwards because he liked all that purple; it does contrast rather well with the autumn leaves…
Karen Gillmore Art 
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