A textured first wash can create great interest in a painting and provide a cohesive color palette. My time-lapse video shows the creation of what I call a "netting" background which, in this case, begins to form the crevices in a cliff.
I hope you don't find the video too confusing, because it is
upside-down, with the top of the painting
at the bottom.
I started by spraying the watercolor paper with water, letting it run sideways, in the direction of the crevices. Next I used a large round paint brush to dab in dilute fluid acrylic but realized that this 35" X 29" sheet of paper would dry too much at the bottom if I didn't switch to a pipette for applying the paint. Since the paint was a bit more saturated with pigment compared to what I used with
the brush, I sprayed the paint with water to reduce the intensity and to help it run across the paper. At the end I splattered more paint to create some darker splotches on the cliffs. Since the paper was quite wet, many of the splotches seemed to melt into the background, which was fine at this very early stage of the painting. There are plenty of opportunities to add more drips and drops of paint to the surface creating pock-holes and crevices in the rocks.
Here is an image of the first wash after it was fully dry. You can see it is quite pale, but does develop a varied background upon which to work the cliff wall.
In other paintings, where I want a more distinctive background, I use stronger pigment to water mixtures so the netting effect is much more pronounced and still quite obvious in the final painting. You can see an example of that in my painting, Race.
Rimpo 2017 All Rights Reserved. You may share my work with attribution and a link to this source site, but all other uses are prohibited.
I hope you don't find the video too confusing, because it is
upside-down, with the top of the painting
at the bottom.
I started by spraying the watercolor paper with water, letting it run sideways, in the direction of the crevices. Next I used a large round paint brush to dab in dilute fluid acrylic but realized that this 35" X 29" sheet of paper would dry too much at the bottom if I didn't switch to a pipette for applying the paint. Since the paint was a bit more saturated with pigment compared to what I used with
Here is an image of the first wash after it was fully dry. You can see it is quite pale, but does develop a varied background upon which to work the cliff wall.
In other paintings, where I want a more distinctive background, I use stronger pigment to water mixtures so the netting effect is much more pronounced and still quite obvious in the final painting. You can see an example of that in my painting, Race.
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Rimpo 2017 All Rights Reserved. You may share my work with attribution and a link to this source site, but all other uses are prohibited.
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I look forward to hearing from you. - April