Hi friends
It has been a while since my last post I apologize! We have reached a place in our watercolor exploration from which there are several paths to take and have been deliberating which to follow at this time. What I have come up with is a curriculum of adding tools to your watercolor tool box. For now each entry will be another skill. A lot of painting is building this repertoire of techniques so that when there is something you want to paint you are able to render it in a ‘painterly’ fashion by which I mean not a create and outline and fill it in style but a ‘capturing the essence’ or spirit of what you are rendering.
Today’s tool I call ‘liquid layering’. This is a term I use to label the act of putting in layers when the paper is still wet from previous layers. The benefit of this technique is while building depth of field and color you can keep the edges of the forms you are creating soft. So when might this help you? Anything that is a sphere of course like the end of a nose, a cloud even a rounded rock!
Fairy Dance
(The back ground of this painting was done this way in order to build rich color with very diffused edges between color shifts.)
The best way I found to practice this is painting skies for the drawing does not need to be too explicit! Get your paper wet. Mix up a batch of color that is more pigment than water say a 60% /40% of 70/30. Squirt your paper then start rolling your loaded brush around in the sprayed area. Watch what happens. As this starts to dry take more pigment on your brush and add it in to areas you want darker like at the bottom of what might be the clouds. Take a little stroll and look out your window then come back load your brush the paper should be drier but not dry. Try gently lowering the tip into the still wet area slowly lower the base so more pigment comes out maybe you can form a darker cloud that is flying over the lighter ones!
See the little darker clouds floating in front of a larger cloud mass?
Where the clouds are darker at the bottom is the added pigment when the first wash was still quite liquid.
Have fun with this! Use the density of pigments to find your forms and go with them!