Painting Park Güell: A watercolor view of Barcelona
Back in October, I visited Barcelona for a work trip, and before leaving, I made a stop at Park Güell — one of my favorite places in the city. I took tons of photos and later turned them into a watercolor painting of the stunning city view from Plaça de la Natura (Nature Square).
I’ve been blending digital and traditional techniques in my illustrations, and you can read about my process in some of my previous blog posts — like how I added kids to my Halloween in Brooklyn illustration, the characters for my Stumpy piece, or how I used Photoshop to fix the sky I had painted for my NYC subway artwork.
This time, however, I didn’t use digital tools to add or remove elements, but rather to work on the composition from the beginning. The city view from Park Güell is very complex, and I wanted to create the right balance between the park’s architectural details, the city, and the Mediterranean Sea in the background.
Planning the composition in Procreate
To figure this out, I first created the composition digitally using Procreate. I wasn’t sure about the number of tiles, the distribution between buildings, and the balance of sky versus architecture, so sketching digitally helped me a lot. Once I was happy with the layout, I traced the drawing onto Arches watercolor paper using a lightbox.
As a fun bonus, this process also led to a new project: a coloring page version of the artwork! Thanks to my work in Procreate, I was able to produce a line-art coloring page that you can now buy as an instant download in my Etsy store. It’s been a fun activity for my kids to paint — and adults love it too. You can even trace it onto mixed-media or watercolor paper and use your favorite wet materials!
Painting the Watercolor
When it came time to paint, I started with the sky, the sea, the Sagrada Familia, and the Gaudí park. My favorite part was painting the colorful ceramic mosaics, known as trencadís, designed by Antoni Gaudí. I painted the mosaics and the park architecture with lots of detail, but kept the city buildings in the background more loose and soft, to create a sense of depth.
Here’s the final painting which you can buy as an art print on my store.
PS: If you get the coloring page, whether you color it yourself or with your kids, I’d love to see it! Feel free to tag me on Instagram @pintalustika.
