I really wasn’t sure what to write about this week. Nothing in particular had come up that I just really needed to share. Then I thought about the painting I’m working on and how there are things I’m doing with it that are different and new for me and that might be worth sharing. So here goes.
I try to take myself on a walk in my neighborhood on a daily basis. Usually there’s nothing really notable about the walk. I might meet some of the local pups walking their humans or wave to the postman as he drives by otherwise I just walk and listen to my tunes. Once in a while I come across something that is worth pulling out the phone and snapping a picture of. Sometimes it’s just something I thought would look cool and maybe it can be used as a photo for a blog post or for an Instagram post. A couple of times I’ve managed to get some really useful pictures of some flowers. That was the case recently, though it wasn’t quite the situation expected. It wasn’t a purposeful flower.
I came across this lovely purple violet flower growing up through a crack in the asphalt. Judging by it’s size and that it had bloomed it had been left alone for a while, at least a couple of days. I’m not quite sure how I missed it growing before the day I saw it in full flower. Lost in my head as I was walking I guess. Anyway. I stopped to take several pictures from some different angles and when I got home and really looked at them I realized there was a cool painting to be made.
With the exception of one, I think, I tend to paint flowers on a roughly square shaped paper. I looked at doing that with this and quickly figured out that wasn’t going to have the impact I wanted. For me a big part of the impact of the image is this flower in the asphalt which for me means that more of the asphalt needs to be in the scene than would be if I made the flower the center of the painting. In that case I would only have a little bit of the leaves in the corner and an insubstantial rim of asphalt. So I looked at a larger less square paper in order to have more asphalt. And as it turns out better composition.
The big key here is the asphalt. I really wanted that look. However, I didn’t want to try to paint it all bit by bit, and I didn’t want it to be just a blurry watery grey/black background. I wanted the texture. And this is where the fact that I was planning on using watercolor turned out to be the advantage. There are different effects you can get when using watercolor paints that I suspect are a little more difficult to get with other paints like oil or acrylic. You have the standard watercolor technique of wet on wet, where you wet the paper and then using a fairly wet or loaded brush add paint to the surface and let it sort of bleed across the paper. You can also use this technique and then add things to the surface such as rubbing alcohol, or sand, or salt, and likely several other things, to get some really cool effects.
I happen to have some rock salt, like for making ice cream, that I thought might work well if it would give more of the look of the bits of salt to make it look like the pebbles in the asphalt. I tested it and it did do that but it was fairly sparse because I was just doing a bit of a test. The good and the bad is that when I did it for the painting, I didn’t get as pronounced an effect as I did in my test, so there weren’t the distinct pebbles I had hoped for. As it turns out that’s ok. It really worked out well. Though, at first it was a little monotonous. There wasn’t enough variation in dark and light so I did a second pass and now I’m really pleased with it.
The salt technique is just one of a couple of what I think of as specifically watercolor techniques or tricks that I’ve used so far on this painting. I also used a masking fluid to keep the edges of the flower and leaves tight so I would be able to paint them without the black or grey coming through. And I used a water repellent additive. I’m not sure how well it worked since I haven’t got to that part yet. But when I tested it when I first got it, it worked pretty well so I’m hopeful. That one I added some light yellow to the fluid and then splattered it a bit in a few areas. The idea is that as I paint the flower over this areas, it won’t take up the paint and will leave those tiny light colored bits behind.
I find it really amazing and a little strange working on this painting and using some very watercolor centric techniques. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve never really considered myself a watercolorist rather someone who happens to paint with watercolor. I don’t tend to treat watercolors gently. I expect them to be strong and vibrant not so much soft and delicate, though I should probably reconsider if that’s still true after my last kick painting. It’s just with this one I feel like I’m starting to actually appreciate the possibilities that come with painting with watercolor.
Cheers.