Woman of Constantinople was painted with only three colors, or a triad (hansa yellow, ultramarine and English red, in this case). Below is my workspace. I use Yarka watercolors, and the empty spaces are for pigments that I learned were very toxic (chrome, for instance). The less toxic colors serve me just fine, thanks. Anyway, I typically just use one or two brushes (the one in the watercolor waste water is golden fleece brand, and the thing is older than I am, so they’re pretty good brushes). One has a chiseled end, and one has a point. The golden fleece holds a lot of water.
After that, I made a maquette, because I wasn’t sure about lighting and wanted it to look fairly realistic. (I was also really tired, and it’s easier to tape things together than to invent a lighting scheme:)
I made it out of foam board and a bit of fimo, then stuck it on this old foam I had from sculpture during my freshman year. Well.. I was forced to take sculpture, but I make the most of it. Anyway, yes, just some modge podge (my favorite) and tape. Then I made a charcoal drawing of this:
I was still working out the figure and composition. Just a quickie to work out things, and plus, I think the end result will be darker than that first image, because I’m not sure I want the building to be made of marble. So some of my inspiration is drawn from Pompeii, especially that street she ends up sitting next to:
I drew the sketch in two-point perspective. Perspective is really not as hard as people seem to think. It’s kind of fun. The trouble I usually have with it is making it work with my previous sketches and the composition. But I will talk about perspective later. A really good book is Perspective! for Comic Book Artists by David Chelsea. Even though it says comic book artists, it does say everything… in graphic novel form. Which is great for people like me who need pictures in order to pay attention. (Seriously, I’ve picked up books on color with no pictures at all–oh, fine, moving on:)
It seems like I’ve done a lot in this step, but I mostly thought about the lighting. In watercolors I like to think of it as being in two steps: the value/lighting part and the tinting part. This is because watercolors are so transparent, and I use them very transparently. I would say that most of the time I’m using a 1:1 ratio with pigment/water, and the fact that I use watercolors from the pans is part of it. But then, I water down watercolors from the tube quite a bit. If you use it transparently, you can cover it up better later on if you’re going for something different. Anyway, here I used a mix of ultramarine and English red for the shadows. I think it’s more of a bluish purple. Then I did the floor in the tiles in orange (mix of English red and hansa yellow) leaving the space where I wanted the reflection to be white. Then I added a little yellow to the gravel so that color wasn’t limited to only one portion, and decided the building would be painted yellow/red, too.
I added more washes to the columns. The trick with the columns, for me (and I’m sure there’s a better way out there somewhere) was to make a line down the length of the column in purple, then use clean water to feather it out, daubing at it with a paper towel if it got too dark or out of hand. Then I added the dark lines for the bricks, deciding this building was very old Her hair was colored to see if it would look brown with my limited color scheme, and it did (much to my surprise).
Did a very transparent wash on the bricks, added more English red all over, to the ground, to the tiles, added some orange-y colors to the woman, left the plaster bits white, but didn’t fuss over them much, either. Because I’m using only three colors, I don’t see the need for one big wash, although maybe next time.
Initially I’d drawn a background, but decided that it would detract too much from the figure, who was already pretty small. Anyway, I added another layer of red to the bricks, and then did a wet-in-wet wash of green in the background. Oh, by the way, I’m using Fabriano 300lb cold press watercolor paper.
I detailed the foliage with hansa yellow/ultramarine to make the green, then some red and blue to add some variation.
Sorry for the blurry picture. Anyway, I added some green to the rocks. This is where I just filled in any white spots and added more color/shadow to anything that was too light. I detailed the edges of the plaster/stucco on the walls, for instance, added more layers of color to the entranceway to make it look black. I think one of the key things with a limited color scheme (or really, any color scheme) is to repeat those colors. I added green in several parts, not just for that one location where the foliage is, if that makes sense. Even though I’m using only three colors, the mixed colors (green, purple and orange) would still look strange in isolation, or, at least, they did to me while I was painting.
Hope that was helpful to somebody. Thanks for reading. 
S
