The Red Umbrella

While I walking out to my car in the rain, I happened to notice this lady trying to find her car while talking on her cell phone. It struck me as an interesting concept for a painting. I don't know how far I'll actually take this but I did get it as far as an initial color concept in watercolor. This actually turned out much darker than I was anticipating but since I was just playing with a quick concept I tried to follow where the watercolor was taking me. So it became this almost nighttime walk home through a torrential downpour in the city. I'm pretty happy with the result because there are some pretty interesting things going on in the background that I like. The umbrella and the ground also turned out pretty nice.
This was started with a loose graphite sketch just placing the main elements using only the thumbnail [above] as reference. Next, I jumped right in with the initial watercolor washes, trying to establish a simple value structure and letting the colors mix and layer upon each other. Before the background was completely dry, I used the end of my brush and some paper towel to remove some of the pigment from the paper. This helped to establish some texture and color tonal variety to the background as well as set the initial tone for the rain. Once the image was dry I added some ink lines to the main figure to help bring her into the foreground, then I went over the entire piece with colored pencil to draw in the rain and rain drops on the ground. I had to also darken some of the area in the sky and right next to the figure to further increase the depth in the picture. A few more rain lines and quick color washes and I called it done.
I hope you enjoyed the process of completing this sketch.