The watercolor painting above is about a lady wearing shoes. I don't make the pencil sketch of the whole figure of the lady. What I want to show you is the legs and some part of her body and arms. This painting or watercolor sketch is made as an exercise that I need to perform to improve my skill in mastering wash techniques which are the basic techniques of painting in watercolor. There are several wash techniques that we need to know i.e.: Flat Wash; Gradated Wash; Wet into Wet; Streaked wash.

If you see above, I use flat wash to cover the areas that have been sketched using pencil. I used Staedler Marsh Lumograph 100 2B as the main tool for making the sketch. Then I colored it using Derwent Watercolor pencils using Grass Green 47 for the dress, Gunmetal 69 for the shadow, Raw Sienna 58 for the floor and Brown Ochre 57 for the legs and arms. This watercolor sketch was made on sketch pad whose surface is smooth. However, because the paper is so thin, it buckled when I applied water color on it. As a result when I scanned the paper using Cannon MP258 - printer scanner, the white color of the paper does not entirely cover the base area. The above picture shows the background color of the paper that has white and gray colors which actually are the result of buckling.

Many artists admit that human figures are the most difficult subject to master. They have standard proportions that many artists, even the most experienced ones, are not fully familiar with. When the figure drawing techniques have to be combined with watercolor ones, the level of difficulties is rising. As a matter of fact, when we want to make sketches of a beautiful girl or lady, we have to see the figures as simple geometrical forms. We can divide them into trapezoids, rectangles, and triangles. After that we can make the drawing of the girl by "carving the basic geometrical forms) to create the human figure that we need to make.

For example, when I wanted to make the watercolor sketch of a foot wearing a shoe, I considered it as a triangle. After drawing the triangle in thin lines, I began carving it to form a shoe and a foot inside. Because most part of the fingers of the foot were not feasible, I only needed to add two lines to extend the foot up to the lower part of a leg. The drawing or watercolor painting of the shoes in this article will be used for my other article that discusses the latest trend in footwear. Everyone of us has at least a pair of shoes. They can be made of synthetic fiber, plastics or leather. The most common leather shoes are made of cow leather. Unfortunately, we often see shoes that are manufactured from skins of protected wild animals. Such practices should be stopped to protect endangered wildlife. I want to remind people about the importance of avoiding shoes that are made of skins of endangered wild animals such as hunted crocodiles and snakes. We can use any kind of shoes that are available in the department store but we must not encourage the hunting of wild animals. by Charles Roring

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