Watermelons make us think of summer, sunshine, and holidays. Feel summery at home all year round when you enjoy this fruity illustration.
My color palette for this project. See My Materials
1To help you place the melon design centrally on the paper, draw thin lines with a pencil and ruler at the left, right, upper, and lower edges. Then draw a semi-circle roughly in the middle of the markings, so that it resembles a slice of melon.
Always have a cloth to hand so that you can dab off any excess paint, if necessary.
2Begin adding color to the red flesh of the fruit, using the washing technique. To do this, apply light and dark red tones to the damp paper while they are wet. Unique color gradations will form as the colors run into one another.
3The outer green skin of the fruit is also produced by washing. Apply a transparent green tone to the skin area, using a lot of water and very little paint. Then get a somewhat deeper green tone on your brush and dab a little here and there along the outer edge of the skin. The color will slowly begin to run into the light green tone. When you are happy with your color effect, leave it all to dry completely.
Leave a white space unpainted between the red flesh and green skin of the melon. That way you won’t have to wait for one of the two colors to dry before you continue painting, as the colors can’t run into each other.
4Sketch in the teardrop-shaped seeds of the melon with a pencil. Keep your pencil lines as light as possible so that they are easy to rub out and don’t leave any traces on the watercolor paint.
5Carefully color in the seeds with a black fineliner pen.
If you think your finished watermelon is too small in relation to the size of the paper, or it isn’t positioned centrally, don’t despair. Simply adjust the paper to your design. The same thing happened to me with the melon painting shown here — it just looked too small when it was finished, so I decided there and then to trim the paper to a more suitable size.