Watercolor Pencils Part Three

Today I decided to focus on simple shapes because I had such a difficult time with shading my leaf yesterday.  I had a image in my head of shapes floating on a soft background.  I really like the background technique I used yesterday and wanted to do it again.

This time I used some vinyl material (normally used to apply shapes and words to walls or glass) to mask out triangles and then watercolored the background using the wet paper/wet brush technique from yesterday.

Then I removed the vinyl and drew around the white spaces with the watercolor pencils (after I let the background dry) and drew in lines to emulate pyramids.  Then I shaded in colors on each side of the pyramids to give shape and height to them and attempted to add add shading by using darker colors. Once this was done I used a small round watercolor brush to apply water to pencil.

It was a very hit and miss process and again I wondered if I would be more successful on watercolor paper. I'm off from work today so I may take time to redo it on better paper.  I think the index card might grab to much paint.  From what I have read, I should be able to lift color off the paper, but that's not happening for me.

Once I fussed with it for I while i decided to try and add some shadowing under the pyramids to see if I could create an illusion of floating.  Not sure I quite achieved that, but I'm not completely unhappy with the result.

I can see I have a long way to go, but I feel like I'm heading in the right direction. When I try this again, I'm not going to draw in lines for the pyramids....I'm going to create the shapefes with shading.

EDIT:

Okay...I immediately ran into my craft room and started again with watercolor paper.  I'm much happier with the results. Watercolor paper (cold press in this case) definitely makes a difference in the work-ability of the pencils.  I had more control of my shading.  I still need to work on both my shading and shadowing techniques (for instance...I shaded the wrong sides of the orange pyramids!), but I feel better about being able to progress with it.  Here are my shapes, take two!