Watercolor: Garden Fantasy Week 1

I wanted to start out this painting in a little bit different way from what we have been doing lately just to show that there is so much you can do and have fun while you're painting so I wanted to start this painting by splattering.

I am working on a half sheet of watercolor paper so it is 15 by 22. I wanted to have it a little bit bigger so that I had room for my splatters to show around the edges of my design. I get my design on my paper by transferring it with graphite transfer paper and then went over some of those lines with a number 2 pencil.

Before you start splattering be sure you have water on of your pants so that they are in pools of water because that is what you'll be using to splatter with and you want your pigments to be ready to go for this step.

PV Version

I started with my light colors such as my yellow and I mixed it on my palate with lots of water. Be sure your palate is clean when you do this so you don’t muddy your colors. I mix my yellow with enough water so that it was a very runny mixture. I was using a round brush and a half inch flat brush. I filled the brush well with this mixture - you want it to be dripping off the end of your brush - and then splatter on your paper. If you want to you can take your spray bottle and lightly spritz your paper so that there will be spots of water on your paper when the color hits the spots of water it will spread out and give a different look from where it hits dry paper you can also spritz the paper after you have splattered just don't do it too often otherwise your paper will be too wet and your colors will start bleeding into each other.

After the yellow I went to orange than to red, I have a color called (p)thalo yellow green, another color which is a cheap Joe's color called Andrews turquoise, along with my ultramarine blue and my dioxazine purple. The trick to splattering is to know when to stop, you want enough splattering to make it look interesting and fun like confetti on paper but you don't want so much that the colors start bleeding into each other creating muddied brown colors you can also do more splattering after it dries and add more color just know when to stop so that you don't get muddied colors. Keep a paper towel handy to sop up any unwanted color combinations.

Once my splattering had dried I needed to protect the areas that I wanted to leave unpainted at this point, which would be the pagoda in the foreground and the foam in the water from the waterfalls so I will need to protect them making the rest easier to paint. You will need your masking fluid an old paint brush and some soap: you first rinse your brush in water, rub it around in the soap to cover all the bristles down to the metal ferrule, wipe off the excess foam and then load the brush with the masking fluid and paint out the pagoda. Once that is completely painted out then add touches around where the foam will be and in the fall themselves add some streaks of masking so later when we are finishing up the water we will have lighter areas that will look like shining in the water to give them movement. This has to dry completely before starting the next step if you are in the PV class this was as far as we got so we will cover the following next time we meet.

 

Torrance class, I started under painting for my trees and bushes and ground cover around the stream and around the pagoda. Mostly I used greens but I also use some orange/reds for the under painting for some of the other plants that will be in there I am NOT specifically painting any particular plant at this point I'm just under painting and that is where we stopped in class so please try to have your paintings to this point for next class and we will continue on from there. Keep painting and I will see you in class