Back to Work Yet Again part 6

Got some errands done early today and decided to get up to the Studio and take care of some big things.  One of the biggest color groups on this tattoo print is all the blues and I left those until the end.  Did a few little bits last week, but today I would take on the rest of it.  In the right side panel, the deep background includes some sky and some ocean, both relatively small pieces of the composition.  Surrounding the dragon all the way around are a bunch of bubbles.  (smoke, air, I have no idea what they are, just something I found in other vintage Japanese dragon images, but liked the effect) As with the official prototype, went with a wash of pthalo blue.  As for the dragon, in my initial color study of the first proof I had started with a green dragon, but didn't like the color balance for the whole thing, and redid the proof with deep ultramarine blue.  (research had shown that this particular culture had a variety of different colors for dragons with various symbolism, so the blue was logical)  Due to the challenges of watercolor and this delicate Japanese paper, coloring the dragon today was a complex task, taking almost 2 hours, filling in each scale one at a time.  Really ties the whole composition together.  The left panel had blue things too, but simpler- parts of the fish head (with the human hand emerging from the mouth) and the jeans on the woman being tattooed.  For the latter, mixed a bunch of blue (a mix of indigo and ultramarine, and bit of white) and put it down as a base.  After this has thoroughly dried, I'll go over it with some washes to add shadows.  So a few touch ups will be coming, but otherwise this print is about done.  Once this one is finished I can move on to coloring the other boardwalk print I have an order for.

The other thing I did today was take advantage of my large studio table to go through the large pieces I collected from my Intro class last week, and will need to return this week.  Didn't have the official grading sheets with me, but mental notes made today will speed up the process for when I do the official grading later this week.