Watercolors- Using Masking Fluid and Plastic Wrap for an Abstract Flower

I got some new masking fluid in early September, and I got around to playing with it.  Here's the pic--

So, finally, some success with the masking fluid! I've ruined a few paintings in the past with masking fluid, and never could figure out why.  I was getting a bit of tearing whenever I would try and lift it.

So, I read a bit on how to use it, and discovered that the most common reasons for failure were either 1) that it was an old bottle that had separated too much (mine was almost 3 years old), 2) that it was the Windsor & Newton brand of masking fluid (which mine was) or 3) that you either applied it while the paper was still even a little bit damp (I often did), or 4) that you removed it before it was totally and completely dry (I did this too).  So, no wonder I'd been failing. 

Anyways, this time me and Tasha practiced splattering the fluid, and painting some marks.  I would do this one night then paint the next day.  Peel in the evening, then paint again.  Splatter in the morning then paint in the evening, etc.  So far, the experiment has been fun!  And all in the all the painting might be considering successful.

1. Here's the first step, with the masking fluid still largely on in an number of areas.  It's where it looks very orange and kind of shiny.  I just did a wet, playful, loose wash in the background and let it run.  Black bleeds occurred where the watercolor was caught and trapped by the masking fluid!

2. I laid down the first set of yellow-green washes in what would become the background.  Me and Tasha recently played with plastic wrap (Xmas red!) and watercolors, in a bout of experimentation and internet research.  Fun stuff!  Makes amazing, random, natural shapes and patterns.  Pardon the cooky perspective.

3. Here you can see the beginnings of of the background patterns.  I've also begun to peel off some of the masking fluid- but not all of it!  I decided to go for a more mottled, varied look, by removing different areas of masking fluid and painting on different layers at different times.

4.  Here you can see background after I've punched in 2-3 layers of blue green, as well as a few more applications of plastic wrap.  All the masking fluid is now off too.  Here I've also begun to map out the shape of the flower more-- I put some blues around its edges, as if it were lit from the center, and I've dropped in some more red and yellow into the center, to draw the eye in.

5.  All done.  Here I've added some streaks of blue-green into the flower itself, to push the sense of emanating light through some cast shadows, as well as to define the sense of the crenulated  (??a word??) texture.  I've also done a few more washes in various corners to add a sense of background light coming from one direction.

Watercolors- Wet Red Poppies

I did this one on Aquabord back in early September.  Aquabord is a kind of hard, plaster surface that you can paint directly on with watercolors.  It's not on paper, so there's no prep or stretching required.  Once you're finished, if you want to protect it you just seal it with a varnish and you can hang it.  Some come pre-attached to a mounting frame as well.  What's cool is that you can also just put the whole thing under running water, rub it a bit, and it all washes away.  Cool!  But a bit scary....

It's had to work this kind of surface aggressively, as the paint will eventually come up.  Instead, I really just dove in and did my layering smoothly and quickly.  This works very well on surface, and it doesn't muddy up at all.  In the end, a very different experience than paper, but fun!  I loved that prep wasn't required at all.  That really got me painting.

Of course, it costs much more than normal paper does, but I've got to prep so much with the normal paper that I don't paint as much as I'd like.  With this stuff, it may cost a bit more, but it seems like I might actually paint a bit more because of the lack of prep required.

Poem- Folding Clothes

I wrote a new poem last and thought I'd share it.  It was a quiet afternoon and I had chores to do. Kat was out with Tasha.  So I sat down to fold.  I could hear a neighbor working on something with a hammer.  There was someone else listening to a Spanish pop-song on a radio.  Everything felt sort of pleasantly peaceful and not-too-close.  I like some of Emily Dickinson's poems, where she's engaged in trivial, day to day activities and observations.  I like that sort of attentiveness.  I like to imagine someone far away or in the future reading it and wondering "What was daily life like in the early 21st century in the US?  Were they just like us?"  I've written a poem about cooking muffins before, to give an example, and have often thought a sort of Ode to the Ladle would be fun and informative to write.  Anyways, here's this one.

Folding Clothes

I like folding clothes

when the house is quiet

and the windows open.

I tuck the pockets in first, for the pants.

Then I fold them in quarters, tugging at the seams.

The towels I fold in thirds

like my father taught me,

the shorts in half .  The bras

I fold cup into cup, with the straps bundled inside

like a bowl of noodles.  The socks—

I separate them and match at the end, like my mother.

I match

 seam to seam.

I tuck the arms in.

I drape them properly on my lap.

I fold them in half, then half again,

            so they’ll fit in the drawers.

I pull the folds tight, and I place them in their pile.

You can get into a rhythm,

if you’re careful and quiet,

            much like the drapes,

                                                billowing and receding,

that sigh now

against the wood like waves.

9/22/13

How to Paint a Mural- Step Eight- What does sunlight pushing through a flower petal look like?

Late last month I did get to do some new work on the mural.  I focused almost entirely on the existing poppies.  What we've got now is this--

something which I'm much more satisfied with.

Why did I come back to the poppies again, for what was, I believe, the 3rd time?  Well, I was still not entirely satisfied with the look of the poppies back in July/ early August, because--
1) there just wasn't that sense of being being "illuminated" and slightly transparent to them, the way a thin petal is with sunlight pushing through them,
2) everything looked very opaque, very dense, and
3) the form still read very flat, rather than rounded and three dimensional.

I had tried to get that sense of transparency in the first attempt, by adding white to the red paint to lower the value, but this just gave me a paler peach color that still looked opaque.  I liked the affect of the shadows, but everything became very abstract, and the object didn't really read easily enough as a poppy.  What I got was this, for those who don't remember that post from back in May  ;) --

The second attempt included changing the actual form and position of the flowers, so that they could be more "open"-- thus allowing a person to see "inside" them and making them more easily readable as a three dimensional object.  It also included pushing the color to a purer red-- poppies are, in essence, very saturated.  Things read better, but there still wasn't that sense of sunlight, of the luminescent, transparent nature of a petal.  Here's what that stage looked like-

But then I saw this image

while browsing some watercolor materials, and it struck me-- sunlight is yellow, and thus yellow is the color I should be mixing in the red, and in much greater quantities than before, to get that luminescent quality I was aiming for.  Towards the end, I got daring, and did some bristley, dry-brush work using pure yellow for the backlit veins, and pure red for the shadows in those same areas.  I also decided to add some white to the poppies for glare highlights and some black to them as well, for those little dots some poppy petals have on them, as well as for the seeds.  Partly I did it for representation, but I also did it to stretch the value scheme some, to give a fuller range.  What I came out that experiment with was this--

  

Once I'd finished it, and felt like it really finally was starting to work, I wondered at the "why" of it.  It's something I'd like to understand better so I can perhaps replicate it in the future/ apply the knowledge generally.  What occurred to me was that the yellow was appearing lighter in value in the painting, even though both it and red were pure chromatically.  Here's a black and white image of one of the poppies that shows this--

Basically, the yellow streaks appear "lighter/whiter" in black and white, and the red streaks appear "darker".  I did some research, and found out that yellow actually is a "brighter" color on the value scale.  It has something to do with the way it reflects light waves and what our eyes are made to see.  Someone actually shared this really interesting image illustrating this point in a conversation I had on the WetCanvas forum--

The short of it though is that by mixing more and more yellow into my red, I got it to appear both
1) lighter in value/ more washed out, so to speak and
2) more luminescent, as if the petal was "glowing" with light (the way it looks when backlit by sun).

My hope is that I'll be able to apply this knowledge to the grass when I break into it soon.  I've penciled in the general shapes, and how they're going to be overlapping the existing flowers, so I hope I'll get to it soon!

So far, the math is something like--
5 hours prep, drawing concept image, sketching on the wall, and blocking in forms
20 hours on the sky, painted  4x
10 hours on the clouds, painted 2x?
15 hours on on the poppies, painted 3x

15 hours on grass??
15 hours on yellow poppies
10 hours on going back over stuff??? --> i.e. insane desire to learn and improve perception/ reproduction of the natural world to (by most standards) a meticulous level of detail

Of course, an artist is rarely satisfied, and I've since pondered a few additional things I'd like to explore on the painting-
1) What's the color of glare?  First I thought pink but that wasn't right.  Then white, but that hasn't played right either.  Finally, I tested a bit of pale yellow, but I didn't like that either.  I've just not been able to get it right.
2) I feel like there ought to be more cast shadows from the poppy petals on the upper left down onto the poppy petals themselves on the lower right, to get that sense of directional light.
3) I feel like the clouds that are closest, and most directly above, ought to have whiter whites and darker darks.   I like the way the distance reads, but I think I could get more "pop" out of the closer ones.

We'll see though.  Sometimes, you've just got to push forward, or you never finish anything...  ;p

Watercolor- View from a Window

I worked on this the other day. Had some fun. The paper is Strathmore's 200#, so what's nice is that it costs a lot less than 300# Arches paper, but also requires a lot less prep than normal 140# paper. I work really wet, so I normally have to wet and stretch my paper with staples, etc on my board-a laborious, slow process that often stops me from getting painting because it takes too long. But with this stuff, I was able to just tape it down the board and get working. In the end, there was some buckling, but not much, and it dried very tight. So,success!
 
Additionally, the paper was big- 2' x 3', I believe, or 2' x 30". It was really fun working big. The vertical lines in this were originally truly upright, but I'm working from a snapshot, and there were some issues with things digitally. So, it is what it is here. Oddly, as it's rather abstract, I like it in both orientations below. :)

How to Paint a Mural- Step Seven- What do red poppies look like?

I've had a lot of practice over the last few months with painting things on a large scale, particularly things I have no experience painting-- as in, I'm becoming used to being ignorant!!-- so I sat down and researched a bit about what poppies look like, what their shape is, color, etc. before I started painting.  I noted to Kate how, when I was painting the tree trunk and leaves in mural downstairs, that I got to a point where it was clear that I didn't know what type of tree I was actually painting, and that that lack of specificity was affecting my ability to paint something that felt real.  I didn't want to repeat that fact.  So, research first.

I've also learned that a bit of trial and error, error being the key word, is going to be necessary when painting something new.  So, I planned on NOT painting all the poppies at once, but only giving it a go on a few.  I set about painting three poppies based on some images from some google searches I did.  I got these featured in the pic below, and ended up not being satisfied after 2 hours or so of work.

I kept trying to figure out how to get that experience of light pushing through a semi-transparent object (like a petal) and creating shadows on a closer petal.  Wow, that's difficult!  The major issue, IMO, was that I was adding white to my orange mix, but this came off as an opaque "peach" color. I also think that the images I chose to start from were too abstract.  I couldn't tell they were flowers.  I couldn't see "into" them.

So, a few days later, I did more research, found alternate images to cull from for inspiration, printed them out at Kinkos with rich, full color, and then came back home, taped them on the wall, and proceeded to completely repaint over the flowers I'd done, blocking in the new shapes.  That gave me this-

When I came back to the poppies a few days later, I decided that sunlight, being yellow, should make the poppies more orange where sun was pushing through, and the shadows more purple than brown as the contrasting color.  These new ones also had a more open shape, which allows us to see "into" them.  I think they read much better now.  Altogether, including messups, something like 8 hours on these 5 poppies.

But I really feel like I've crossed some sort of border!!  I can see the end coming now.  I think getting these true "physical" object in there, with a denser value, is helping me see the image more clearly.  I'm very excited to get the grass, with all it's messiness and shadows on here soon.  Then we can really cross that horizon line, and start bringing the composition together.

Again, this is where I've ended up so far.  Something like 35-40 hours total so far, but lots of learning in that number!  :D

How to Paint a Mural- Step Six- What Do Clouds Look Like?

After all the time I spent on the sky, I was pretty ready to push through into clouds.  Perhaps I learned a little something from all those mess-ups, because this process went faster.  Perhaps it was just because the space covered was so much smaller.

Anyways, I now know that the paint is darker when dry than it is when wet.  I also know to make test patches and let them dry before painting a whole area.  I also know that things are paler, greyer, and browner/ more yellowy the closer they get to the horizon.  I also knew that it was better to do some research before I started.  Even so, things didn't go perfectly. 

My first pass ended up with clouds that had shadows that were too dark and too blue, and with highlights that were too yellow.  So, as with all these stages, I went outside and spent a lot of time looking at and studying clouds.  I surfed the web and looked at various images.  I watched more youtube tutorials.

Here's some closeups of the clouds.  Things look a bit richer and darker in color in person.

BTW, these tutorials by muraljoe on youtube are a life saver.  He's amazing.  Very articulate and a good teacher.  Well worth checking out if you want a lot of pointers of how to paint murals.

Here's the video I watched repeatedly while learning to paint clouds-

As well as this one, which discusses how they look when up above-