Watercolor Hamburger

Burgers are great year-round, but there's something about summer that makes them taste even better. They're also a really fun subject to paint. Affiliate links below. 

Watercolor Hamburger

Materials:

• watercolor / mixed media paper
• Koi travel watercolors
• Faber-Castell World Colors

Steps:

Note that, as usual, I've used a pen for the step-out photos so that you can see them easily. On the actual painting, I used a pencil to sketch as lightly as possible. 

I've found that the easiest way to draw a burger is from top to bottom. If you want to do the opposite, just reverse my directions. 

Start by drawing the arc of the top bun in the middle of your paper. Rather than drawing a straight line across to make a half-circle, use a very wiggly line to draw lettuce on the left side and a smoother line to make an onion on the right side. Then draw in a layer of tomato slices. 

Beneath the tomatoes, add the corners of some cheese slices. Draw the curved ends of a nice, thick burger patty, then draw a wiggly line to make more lettuce. Finally, draw the bottom bun.   

Now it's time to paint the burger. With watercolor, you want to make sure one section is dry before adding color to an adjacent part so that the color doesn't run. I do this by skipping around. Instead of painting the bun and then the lettuce, I do the bun and then the meat, because those sections don't touch. 

Start with a golden color for the bun, adding shadowing along the top and bottom. Use the same golden color to add dots of color to the meat. Choose a medium brown and add more dots of color to the meat. Continue adding dots of color to the patty until it resembles perfectly-cooked hamburger. Paint the onion a pale purple and the tomato red. Paint the lettuce using a similar technique as with the meat, adding dots of paint in different shades of light green. Paint the cheese yellow. 

Paint a horizon line behind the bottom bun, then color beneath that line with whatever shade you've chosen to represent your plate / countertop / serving tray. Allow that to dry, then add the color of the wall / sky / backsplash above the horizon line. 

This is what my burger looked like when I put away my paints. 

 

You can stop here, but I wanted a cleaner look. I went in with my colored pencils to add definition. This is most evident on the cheese, onion, and lettuce. I also added the hint of sesame seeds to the top bun. 

It looks almost good enough to eat!