Abstract Watercolor - Stonewards Glyph

Title: Stonewards Glyph

Size: 11 by 13 inches

This piece is a warm on cool abstract watercolor portraying the symbol of the Order of Stonewards (from Stormlight Archive).

I set aside an hour and a half of my schedule for this painting. The sketch of the glyph took an hour and a half. And don't even get me started on the taping. It was rather exasperating. 

Ta-da! There's what the tape looked like...

The Order of Stonewards is a pretty mysterious group, and so my knowledge of them is quite limited. But I thought that drawing their (awesome looking) glyph would be a nice way to sort of "get to know them" a little better.

So apparently the Stonewards' color is amber. I tried to get as close to that as I could on the glyph, but still wasn't completely satisfied with how it came out. Then I was given the brilliant suggestion to try using pen and colored pencil to bring out the contrast even more. I really like how that turned out. :D

Another part of this project was to use complementary colors to bring out the 'abstract shape', so I used a lot of violets in the background. But then I wasn't quite happy with the amount of red in the initial wash, so I ended up adding a lot of teal and blue before the water dried.

I'm not normally a "tape things out first" sort of painter, but I think tackling a project with such a huge amount of taping has helped me learn to better appreciate the usefulness of painting. It was a fun (if time consuming) project. ;)