playing with paint – Daily Fiber

I received some new paint colors this week and it’s time to see what they look like. So I did a little free exploration.

Olive green and burnt umber have been added to my palette.

I splashed them on Stonehenge 100% cotton paper with ultramarine blue, quinacridone red, quinacridone gold, and alizarin crimson. While still wet I worked in some metallic gold.

Here I am trying out a new brush. It is a 1/4 inch dagger, very soft, and shaped like a, well, a dagger.

The paper was first splashed with water, causing the lines to break up and run down the paper. I pulled the brush through the center of the curves to carry the blue all the way down. After the paper dried, I added a few lines with extra-fine Micron pens.

Wonder what I will do tomorrow?

You may recall that I was back to experimenting in water color paint earlier this week. Working with carbazole violet, I laid down a wash and then lifted the paint back in vertical lines. Because these looked like tree outlines to me, I added some pencil lines to accentuate the effect.

Yesterday I returned to this sketch. Deciding that I would continue with one color, I started to layer up violet washes between the white lines. This went pretty well, except for the fact that some of the white trunks and branches got covered up. In my mind the painting was ruined. Instead of giving up on it, I let the paint dry and then, following the lines of the trunks, lifted up the paint to find some branches. I stroked some paint horizontally in the foreground to suggest tracks in the snow. Finally I dabbed water and dots of paint in upper area of the paper, splashed on more water and let it dry again. Now I was willing to sign this one.