A bit of an odd assortment. I've been struggling a bit with the watercolour medium and I'm finding it a bit unnerving, and feeling a bit insecure about learning as I go whilst maintaining my postings here. But I've come to the conclusion that that is partly what the philosophy of Daily Painting Blogging is about.
White Marble115x115mm or 4.5x4.5"
Watercolour on Saunders Paper
An aspect of watercolour is you've got to decide where the white highlights go from the outset. This is pretty much the exact reverse of oil painting where the final highlights are put in towards the end. I got some frisket masking medium to try out. The idea is you paint this rubbery stuff where you want the paper to stay white and peel it off at the end. I tryed it on the marble but wasnt at all happy with it and ended up resorting to using an opaque white, effectively changing the painting to more of a guache style. This painting itself was painted on the verso of this other aborted attempt. Just little slightly laboured studys. So if anyone wants to purchase this piece of paper, you can show it either way around, but one way or another you're going to lose some of your marbles...
Verso
Marbles
190x115mm
Watercolour on Saunders Paper
Paul, your marbles look great on the computer!
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to let you know that there is a Chinese White watercolor that can be used. But, when I need a little highlight or white somewhere, after I have put in color, I use a little white acrylic. That works very well.
You can also use something like a stencil knife or pen knife and scratch off the watercolor back to the white paper.
This is something that I have heard other artists talk about, but haven't tried myself yet. You can use one of those Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, I think that is the name. It is a cleaning product from the grocery store-looks something like a spongey blackboard eraser. They say that it can be used to lift color in doing watercolors. I've seen work by Myrna Wacknov and Nancy Standlee where they used the eraser, and it looks great.
The masking fluid seems to work best, if you can plan that far ahead. Mine always seems to dry up in the bottle before I can use very much of it, though.
You probably already know all of this, but thought I would pass the information on to you, in case you haven't heard it.
Thankyou Cecelia! Useful tips! I dont know if it was Chinese white I was using but it was a white guache paint. Actually I've been wondering if acrylic gesso would work - I've noticed a lot of artists working with watercolour on gessoed sufaces.
ReplyDeleteBut ideally I think the great thing about watercolour is it's freshness and spontinaity and you tend to lose that when you start mucking around too much..!