Month: February 2022

More Watercolor Experimentation

Comments? Click the title of any post and you will find a comment form at the bottom of the page.

Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

Fireworks on the Beach

Fireworks on the Beach 2

Fireworks on the Beach 3

I began this painting on a full sheet of watercolor paper. This time it was a handmade Indian paper with very little sizing. I put blobs of water down and floated the color into them. Once again, I did not stretch the paper or tape it to a board. The water made it curl up and make hills and valleys, all very irregular. I love that. It guides the color when you float it into the water, and makes very interesting shapes.

Because the picture reminded me of fireworks, I felt that it should have a background of night sky, and I set about creating one, after the fact, filling in the empty background areas with a dark blue-black color. Here I made some new discoveries. I found that if I wet the lighter areas enough, the clear water would eat its way into the dark blue paint in an irregular and spidery fashion. SEE THE IMAGE ON THE RIGHT.

I’m not sure of where this is all going, but I want to make the abstract shapes seem to be floating, translucent, like colorful lit up clouds. I’ll post it when I’m done. I know I will have to deal with straightening out the paper afterwards. Wish me luck.

Wet in wet watercolor, an exploration

Comments? Click the title of any post and you will find a comment form at the bottom of the page.

Weary of painting content, I have decided to explore what watercolor will do if allowed a little freedom to be itself. I splashed this paper with blobs and spatters of water. It is a compliant sort of paper – Strathmore Aquarius – and has the amazing quality of flattening itself out after you have painted on it, because it is a cotton and synthetic blend. Or almost flattening itself out, as you can see from the photo. I did wet it to start with, but used no tape for the edges. Then I floated bits of color into the wet areas and let the color go where it wanted to. I proceeded to add more water, more color, letting the whole thing take shape. I especially like where the edges of the blobs dry first and suck more color into themselves. I stopped early on this one so that I didn’t ruin whatever I thought was good about it with too much fussing.