Joker Painting- Getting Ready

I am continuing to work on the joker in water color. It is difficult to mix the colors right for the vest and pants. Its been difficult because it is just such a dark picture but if you use black it overpowers the rest of the colors already mixed. One way to make the paint darker is with primary colors such as red and blue. Mixing those colors together can make your color combos darker but not too dark. Shadows have also proven difficult in this piece mostly because ninety percent of the picture is shadows.  I also may not finish the water color version of this picture. I was only doing to get a feel for color mixtures and being able to apply them to specific areas. Once I feel comfortable enough with it I will move onto my acrylic version on a larger wood board canvas. Ive never worked on wood board canvas but it is just a canvas wrapped tightly around a board made of wood. This is different then a traditional canvas, which is a canvas wrapped tightly around a wooden frame. This means that the middle of the canvas has nothing supporting it and gives the canvas some give to it. The wood board canvas is flat underneath the whole canvas so the whole thing has no give to it. I think this will give me more control of the brush and the strokes I make which i think will be very beneficial to me and this piece. This will probably be the last post I will be doing of this piece in water color because once i figure out how to mix the purples for the pants I will move onto the canvas. I prefer working with acrylic paint because even if you mess up it is easy to go over it and fix it.