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This fantasy-ish painting was my contribution to an artbook about "time". Concept was that one day was divided into 48 parts (each representing a time, in half-hour steps) and an artist would create a picture for that particular time. I took this as an excuse to make something with a sundial and specifically requested to get a time-slot around noon! As you can see, I ended up with "half past one, PM".

Technique of my painting is - hard to believe, I know - watercolor, in several layers, which I'm going to show here as a little step-by-step thingy.

I started with this pencil sketch. It actually kind of created itself more or less randomly; I included different types of clocks (the "classical" being the requirement of the artbook) and a sunflower because it went with my overall "sun" thing.

Tn the first color layer, I started in the way I usually start my illustrations: with the shadows. This not only helps me defining light and dark areas in the image, it also helps me to cohere the overall color scheme. In this particular painting, the overall impression was to be that of intense yellowish sunlight, so I chose purple as its complementary for the shadow layer.

The next layer, added with "pseudo-airbrush" (aka cheap paintbrush and my thumb) just defines overall areas of warm and cold colors.

After that, the actual detail work started. It involved a lot of opaque white for the areas that in the end were sopposed to be in sunlight. (However, I've had people remark that they liked this picture already and it could be already considered "finished". This is true, I suppose - if I had not needed the sunlight for the motif I had planned. (Difficult to explain to the people organizing the artbook that my "half past one, PM" painting suddenly has a night setting!)

So I just liberally sprinkled the painting with yellow watercolor... Really, this pseudo-airbrush thingy just rubbing your thumb over a cheap bristle brush is completely underrated! In my experience, it's just about the only way to add a complete color layer over a watercolor painting without dissolving the layers below and turning the whole picture to mud.