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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Watercolor Backgrounds - Continued

Good Morning - Are you all ready to start your background?

The first thing I do after I make my sketch is to mask off the areas that I don't want to get paint in. It his case I have masked the outline around the drawing. This is a 12X15.



Next I prepare my paint, I make my paint "juicy" as my teacher calls it, lots of water in the paint. I prepare all the colors that I want to put into my background.
For this picture I prepared teal, green, blue, and red. I use large and medium size mop brushes (natural hair brushes work best, my are black squirrel). I paint in the small interior background areas with my medium brush, these areas will not get Saran Wrap as they are too small.




Next I pick a large section of the background (I do it in sections on larger works, if you are working on a smaller one 5X7 and down, you can do it all at once). I wet my paper and then apply my main color (teal) to this I drop in spots of the other colors at random.


Once you have the section ready (it should be really wet) take a piece of Saran Wrap and crinkle it up, open the wrap up and place over your painted area, smashing it up a little so there will be wrinkles in the Saran Wrap, make sure the edges don't cover up the ajoining background areas.



Continue this process until all background areas have been painted and Saran Wrap applied.


!!IMPORTANT!! You must now let it dry. It has to be completely dry for this effect to work correctly. Walk away from your painting and be patient. I let mine sit overnight.

This is what my painting looked like after I removed the Saran Wrap and then a picture with the mask removed.





You are now ready to start painting the main subject of your painting. I usually start out with the parts that are the farthest back, in this case I will start with the branches. If you'd like to continue on I will be back on the 23rd to add more color to this painting.

5 comments:

Lee Pierce said...

What FUN! Counting down the days to see the rest. Thanks Marlene :D

Unknown said...

Want to hear something dumb? I never thought about just masking the outline of the leaves, or whatever, I always thought you had to fill the whole leaf in. Talk about a light bulb moment. Geez!
Thank you for making something that's probably obvious to most people, understood by me. (blush) : )

Marlene said...

That's okay Brenda, I used to think the same thing also, and sometimes you do need to mask it all as in the pour technique.

Lisa said...

I have never been a watercolor artist so i have never used masking I have to get me some!! Thanks for all this great information! Wonderful!! SO helpful!

Pam of Always Artistic said...

Wow this is a fun technique, I have never heard of using saran wrap, I love the effect it gave!