26 August, 2013 2 comments Leave a comment

While we were travelling around the Great Lakes in our RV last month, I created this painting based on a photo I took while visiting my Mom in B.C. on an earlier trip.

In the photo below, I have started with a pencil sketch on 300 lb watercolour paper and masked out the flower and leaves with Pebeo Masking Gum. I like the fact that it is dark enough to show up against the paper, allowing for better application accuracy.

Once the mask was fully dry, I used Indigo paint on the shadowed crevices between the stones. When dry, I spattered a fine spray of masking gum over the whole painting (using a tooth brush and a pot scraper), to preserve fine white dots in the stones. Then I spattered on a fine spray of Indigo paint and let everything dry overnight.

The next day, I gently wet the entire painting with clear water using a soft, natural hair brush, to disturb the Indigo spatter as little as possible. I gently dropped in muted mixtures of Indigo, Burnt Sienna, Primary Red and Aureolin (yellow). I waited about a minute for absorption and evaporation to reduce the wetness of the wash, then sprinkled table salt sparingly over the entire painting. I let the painting dry overnight.

After brushing off the dry, dirty salt using my pot scraper and fingers, I created a 3-dimensional effect on the stones using my 2-brush technique. I added dark shadows on stones beside the crevice lines, using a brush loaded with Indigo paint, and softened the edge of that shadow towards the centre of each stone, using a brush loaded with clean water. I used as few brush strokes as possible, to minimize disturbance of the previous paint layer.

Once the paper had fully dried, I erased the masking fluid with a crepe eraser, revealing white paper underneath. Some of my pencil lines disappeared in the erasure process, so I redrew them where necessary.

On dry paper, I painted each leaf and the stem, using mixtures of Indigo, Sap Green and Aureolin.

I completed painting the leaves, then defined the petals using Primary Red, Burnt Sienna and a touch of Indigo. A few shadowed areas and white dots were darkened where needed, to complete 'Hyacinth and Drystone', watercolour, 12 x 9". 

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