My Hero

For my final painting project, we worked in watercolors and painted a hero of our own design to be a part of each one. My hero is a magical girl who struggles with being a side character but learns how to accept that and find that even if she’s not the most important person to everyone, she still matters and is still important. Her weapon is a bow and arrows, though her arrows are made of her own energy, so she doesn’t need to carry any physical arrows. The downside to this is that for each arrow she fires, the more energy she uses and each subsequent arrow will be weaker. For my pieces, I wanted my hero to be different distances from the viewer and I wanted every setting to be different, as well.

A watercolor painting of field with sparse trees. The largest tree is in the foreground is a large tree with orange leaves. On a dock by a lake is a small figure with purple hair.
This was my first painting for this project. Here, she is very far away, sitting on the dock on the lake. I hadn’t figured out how I wanted to shade or line in watercolor yet, so it looks very different from my other paintings.
A girl with purple hair, a black headband with a white heart on it, black choker with a white heart, and black strapless top is very close to the viewer. Behind her are 5 tall city buildings.
In my second painting, I opted for much less color. Originally, I planned on the building being lit with turquoise, but when I tested that next to her hair color, they didn’t go together well. For her hair, I mixed Carmine and Pthalo Blue, but for the faces of the buildings, I washed them with Ultramarine and then did another wash over that with Carmine. For the sides, I mixed black and Pthalo. I used Pthalo for shading in both the buildings and hair.
A girl in a black and white outfit stands on a staircase, loading a bow. The wallpaper around her is green and white with pinkish-purple flowers. On the walls are slime creatures with eyes. Four of them are looking at her, one of which has arms. The fifth slime creature has its eyes closed and the sixth is staring at the viewer.
In this painting, I found a middle ground between my first two paintings for perspective and color. For this, I wanted to show her as more of a hero. This fight would be difficult, as she has a long-range weapon but is in a very enclosed space. For this painting, I decided on a lighting and shading color beforehand and painted them on each object before washing them with their real color. For lighting, I chose Deep Yellow and for shading, I used Pthalo Blue. I wanted the main color to be green and yellow, but because her hair and bow are both purple, I echoed the color in the flowers on the wallpaper. This made it so that she would fit more with the rest of the composition. To make the lighting feel more real, I washed everything white with a light yellow, so that everything looked tinted.