More Watercolor and Rice Paper: West Highland Bull

The above painting came from using rice papers on the positive shapes in a painting, to add texture.

I began with a painting and blocked in all the forms I wanted to include, Much like how I began the painting in the previous post.

I covered the bull in torn strips of textured rice paper, working from bottom to top so the pieces would overlap like the hair on the bull would.

I painted the coat following the values I saw in the reference photo. Thank you to Wet Canvas for the reference.

To finish the bull, I glued more torn strips of rice papers on the head and painted them. I painted the light washes on the horns. I glued rice papers on the clumps of foliage behind and to one side of the bull for balance.

 finished painting

I finished the painting by painting the rice paper foliage and  using india ink in the hair fibers and shadows on the bull.

This is a fairly long process because the artist works in steps and gives ample time for each step to dry in between.  I liked this and will use it in future paintings where I want to increase texture.

Woods and Pond: Watercolor and Rice Paper Collage

The above painting is another technique I tried with watercolor and rice paper.

I began by painting the landscape you see, above,  on 140lb Rough Arches Watercolor Paper.

I chose a piece of textured and mostly transparent  rice paper, measured it to the size of my painting and glued it on top of the painting.  I mixed one part water with three parts acrylic matte medium and applied it to the back of the rice paper and carefully laid it over the surface of my incomplete painting.  I used a large flat brush with soft bristles to apply thin layers of the glue mixture to the surface and gently push air bubbles out. A roller can also be used for this step. Handle the wet rice paper gently because it becomes very fragile when it is wet.  The watercolor paper ripples and my rice paper lifted up when it did that. I solved that by reflattening the rice paper with my brush and drying areas with a hair dryer as I did that. I allowed this phase to dry overnight.

 finished painting

Then the work began. I repainted the original scene through the paper and added more colors as well as pushed my darks and detail. I added foreground rice paper shapes and more rice papers to the middle ground, playing with value and texture. The painting, above, is what I came up with.

You can also re-work a failed watercolor painting this way. It is very time consuming, so be prepared for that. I am going to be on the lookout for interesting textures in rice papers to experiment furthur with this technique.

Abner on Masa: Learning From My Mistakes

 photo reference

This is Abner. I have painted him here and here.  This time proved to be the most challenging.

 Fig 1

I had wanted to try something new on masa paper.  Instead of toning the paper, first, I began this piece with a continuous line drawing, in pencil, on the shiny side of a piece of masa paper. I went over those lines with a brush and waterproof india ink. Fig. 1 is what I came up with .

 Fig 2

After the ink dried, I crinkled the masa paper into a ball and wet it thoroughly in a bowl of water, reopened it and allowed it to dry. I then glued it to a piece of taped down Arches 140 lb coldpress watercolor paper. I mixed 4 parts acrylic Matte medium to 1 part water as my glue. I turned the drawing face down and covered the back of the piece with a thin layer of the glue mixture and then turned it over and affixed it to the surface of the watercolor paper by stroking a thin layer of the glue mixture all over the front. I encouraged air bubbles to escape by stroking with my brush from the center out. I then let the piece dry overnight so the surface of the paper was flat to work on. Refer to Fig 2.

 Fig 3

I, next, explored the colors I might want to use for rendering this image and ran into a huge problem! The colors were “dead” looking on the colorful background. They came out very mid-tone and matched the value of the background colors that I had wanted to save for this. I also had another problem. I was trying to paint the dog more realistically than my loose continuous line drawing was going to allow for. I had already lost the light area on the topmost portion of his skull. My next step was to spray what I had painted and lift out as much as I could with paper toweling. Voila! It worked to soften the grays I had tried to replicate and I thought I could, perhaps, continue if I did something with the foreground and background, first. That would give me some time to think about how I might approach painting the dog since my original intent to follow the patterns of the photo were not going to work. Refer to Fig 3.

 Fig 4

I painted loose greens, yellows and blues for the grassy area in the foreground and tried for a bushy red and green background. The background just did not fit, so I sprayed water on the bushy background and lifted as much as I could. It looked awful! …but, at least the dog’s head popped forward some.  I added a very dark underside to the bushes, accentuating two of the colors I had used to begin painting the dog (hoping for harmony). I liked how the original toning of the masa paper began to help me as I painted the dog, so I opted to allow some of the reds and yellows to show through and define some of the dog’s form. I liked portions of what I saw in Fig 4, above, but was about ready to throw it into the trash because I was getting a painting that was largely midtones in value. What did I do? I went to bed on it.

The next morning, with a clearer head and a completely dried painting (Fig 4), I asked myself what I thought the major challenges were. I came up with:

1. Lack of value contrast

2. I would need to work with the quirky distortions of my continuous line drawing

3. I would need to provide some kind of contrast between the dog and his environment

4. I needed to divorce myself from the photo reference and allow my imagination and creativity to come forward

I disliked the background so decided that one way I may be able to provide contrast in value was with a white picket fence in the background. By doing so, that would give me contrast between the flowing continuous lines of the dog and the rigid manmade lines of the fence.

 Fig 5

I rendered the picket fence with white goauche and came up with Fig 5. The white goauche was not sufficient enough, even with two layers, to cover the layers of watercolor which kept bleeding through.

 Fig 6

I pulled out my white acrylic paint and painted it one more time.  What I liked about this was that it immediately provided contrast between dog and background, pushed the dog forward and even looked like a painted wood fence due to the crinkles in the masa paper.  Refer to Fig 6.

Note, also, how the dog’s value became lighter with the brightening of the fence between Fig 5 and Fig 6. This often happens when you make value changes and needs to be addressed. Thus, I knew I had to darken the dog again.

Finished Painting

In the final steps of creating this piece, I worked with blending aureolin (transparent staining yellow),  permanent rose and prussian blue to develop a gray black on the surface of my dog portrait. I opted to allow and exaggerate some of the reds and yellows that were in the original toning of the masa paper, salvaging a quirky look to the color of the dog to parallel his loosely rendered continuous line form. I pushed these colors until I felt his contours read believable. I exaggerated the darkness of his pupils and iris and contrasted that with white goauche for the whites of the eyes and left his muzzle very light so as to draw the viewer’s eye to his face.

This is not at all the end result of what I had pictured in my mind. However, I now have a painting that is creative, somewhat quirky and reads well enough to avoid my trashing it.

The true test will be when my daughter sees this. This is Abner, one of her rescue dogs. He “IS” quirky, energetic and a bit of a prankster. Perhaps that comes through in the color and the playful way I have approached painting him.

What is the message? Don’t give up! Masa paper presents a challenge. As an artist, I have the tools and the creativity to learn from whatever any particular painting is trying to teach me! I can change it to a mixed media if I have to. I can create contrast and push for the values I want there. I may surprise myself.

To view other masa paintings I have painted click here.

Sister’s New Blog !

My sister has recently joined our blogging community here on WordPress.  I announced here, the release of her book on yoga for the special needs child in 2009. She has continued to offer workshops, lectures and demonstrations for educators, physical and speech therapists, doctors and parents of special children. She also shares with her private clients, helping them to grow and experience the gifts that Yoga can offer them. I find her work fascinating and her perceptions new and innovating. She brings a breath of fresh air to everything she does and an element of the spiritual always comes through.   One post I really liked was when she wrote of her daughter and the rescue of a little dog, Bella. You can visit her new blog here.

Welcome to WordPress, Nancy!  

 

New Student Art: Watercolor and Rice Paper Collage

Another class has ended. We had a great time exploring watercolor and Rice Paper Collage.

Nancy Longmate 3

We began with abstract and getting a feel for the different rice papers and how they accepted the pigment.

Dianna Burt

Next we created something from our minds in rice paper and watercolor.

Andrea Andis

Then we worked from a photo of a building and created a landscape out of our mind around it.

Sue Mendenhall

Then we worked from a photograph.

John Kelty 3

The last exercise was to take an old painting and turn it into something new.

A heartfelt thank you to all the participants in this class. You amaze me. To view other examples of the student work in rice paper and watercolor collage click here.

 

The Yellow House 2: A do Over!

This is “Yellow House” the first version.  I posted it earlier on my blog.

…and this is “Yellow House2″, a do over.  As you know, my class has been working in watercolor and rice paper collage for a few weeks, now.  This week, each student is taking an old painting that they think could use something extra to give it a little more appeal and using rice paper collage in it.  Some of these papers are opaque enough to allow for compositional changes such as my adding the slab stairway in this one. Some of the rice papers have textures that compliment the textures found in nature.  I will let you be the judge as to whether this is an improvement on the original.  Just something new you can do with your old paintings.

Still Exploring the Watercolor and Rice Papers: Two More

I takes me a great deal of time to create these. They are never what I set out to create. They happen on the paper.  I am still in the process of learning about the different rice papers and what the pigment does on them. I like going along the edges with my brush and a dark color, most evident in the top painting. I also like washing a transparent color over what I have created to accentuate a mood, most evident in the second painting.  As I worked on this I tried to finish them toward the vision I saw coming from the design on the paper. The first one I titled Glacial Remnants and the second one, Canopy.  I love this way of working. It is as though I am immersing myself in the art and the materials and allowing them to help me work a vision forward.

Flight of the Condor: Watercolor and Rice Paper Collage

The above painting was created  with the use of textured rice papers, watercolor, ink and white goauche. It is an attempt to begin a watercolor and rice paper collage in the same way as the  previous post here. While working on it, we were to search for something recognizable and bring it forward without the use of a photo reference. We relied only on the imagery we saw appear before us and created from that imagery.

The above is my cruciform design that I started with.  I splattered and encouraged dripping. At this stage, I was seeing two mountainous forms with a valley between.

I glued down some torn pieces of rice paper using the water and acrylic matte medium mixture. I fully intended for them to take the shape of  craggy cliffs because that is what I saw, at this stage.

As I added another layer of paint, however, the image that began to appear seemed to be a giant bird form.

I added more rice papers to fill out the wings and began feeding large drippy washes of a dark sky in the background. I remembered something about condors from Big Sur Kate’s blog and how they were endangered and now protected and decided to finish it with that thought.

I deepened the sky until I was satisfied with it and played around with lifting and glueing some more cloud formations in. The condor was created withloads of different torn rice papers, watercolor, ink and white goache to make him appear a little more ghostly.

Others I have created in this manner are here, here, and here.

 

Spring 2012

The above painting was created by using watercolor in conjunction with rice paper collage.  My watercolor students are currently exploring the use of rice papers in their paintings. For the first exercise, we painted a cruciform design on our paper. This is an exercise that Gerald Brommer suggests in his book Watercolor and Collage Workshop.

The image, above, is my initial cruciform design. He tells us we can splatter, work wet-in-wet, and  make small and large marks. One thing we needed to watch out for is to try to not “muddy” our colors in this stage. We waited for this intial design to dry before going on. If we were in a hurry this phase can be dried with a hair dryer.

We, next, tore or cut  pieces of textured manila and white rice papers and affixed them to our initial design using a glue we mixed ourselves. We used 4 parts acrylic matte medium with 1 part water as our glue. Use old brushes to brush the glue onto the paper (less is more) and then apply them to your composition in an interesting  pattern. Cut pieces of rice paper would appear to be more man-made structures and the torn pieces looked more like forms in nature. I have learned, from experience, that I need to be very careful to not brush the glue off the rice paper and onto the adjacent areas of watercolor paper as this changes the way my pigment lays on the paper.  Some rice papers are so thin that I can lay them on the surface of the watercolor paper and stroke the topside of the rice paper with my glue brush. The glue seeps through the porous paper and adheres that to the watercolor paper below. I then stroke gently and lift the excess glue from the top of that piece of rice paper. Once my pattern of glued papers is dry, I again paint into my design. I concentrate on colors that will not create “mud”, often using the colors I used in the initial design. I may, after the pigment is dry, incorporate more rice papers. Sometimes the values are not clear and the artist needs to use more papers to rescue the light values again. I decided my composition, above, fell into that category.

To finish my piece I used permanent white gouache to accent areas of lighter value and went in with my original darks and accented the shapes I wanted to darken with them.

I thoroughly enjoy working with watercolor and collage in this way. It frees me from being tied to reference material and allows for self exploration of texture, value and color. I create these with nothing in mind other than what the paper and pigment direct me to do as they mix and form in front of me.

Two other examples of this technique can be found here  and here.

 

Gesso Juice? and the Empire State Building

A New Year brought me a new adventure, already!

I read an article about the artist, Kathleen Conover,  in my February copy of Watercolor artist, February 2012. I was so taken with her work that I decided to try this “gesso juice” mixture she spoke of to surface her paper with. The recipe for “gesso juice” is 1/2 part white acrylic gesso, 1/4 part clear acrylic matte medium and 1/4 part water.  After mixing this up, I poured some on my taped down watercolor paper and spread it with a credit card, making slashes and dashes and all kinds of shapes on the surface.

I waited for the gesso juice to dry and painted in my initial washes. The surface is very much like painting on gesso. The paint does not sink down into the surface of the paper and mingles differently on this surface. It required more pigment to achieve the above effect.  I had to paint quickly so the side-by-side colors mixed without a hard edge. I waited for the above washes to dry and the surface go flat again.

I drew my composition on the surface and began painting the varied shapes in, being mindful of my values.  This was probably the most difficult phase for me. On this surface, I found, the darks had to be painted with strong dark colors as dark lights just appeared light still, unlike painting directly onrto watercolor paper. So, I learned a lot about my palette through this exercise. I, now, am getting a better feel for their properties.  Value is all important while painting on this surface.

I finished blocking in my composition of shapes and buildings.

In this step, I changed a few colors of the buildings and lifted paint in a lot of areas to show the different patterns, especially on or around the Empire State Building. I darkened a few of the darker value areas and put in a few details on the smokestacks and the antennae on the tops of a couple buildings. I lifted out a lot of the blue on the point of the Empire State so it would show up more.

   final painting

To finish, I splattered some darks I’d used and lifted lights out around the buildings by scumbling some water in those areas and dabbing with a paper towel.

I want to do more of these and explore and explore!