October Night (Saran Wrap Print)

This week in watercolor plus class we all did a saran wrap print in watercolor. The above is my print plus my beginning stage of figuring out how I was going to use it. We turned our prints around looking at it from all 4 sides until we saw something we could work with to create a picture or an abstract to enhance. I always like to use the forms of the original print and try to build on them. I began by building on the moon, outbuildings and foreground flower shapes I found. The moon was filled in with gesso as white didn’t quite eliminate the color from underneath due to the transparent effect of watercolor. The shapes of the flowers and outbuildings  were there, I just painted them in. I wanted this to appear as though I was peering through foliage, from a distance and began laying out different colored leaf forms I tore from rice papers. I used acrylic matte medium to adhere the leaf forms to the paper.

In the next step, I finished the leaf forms, detailed the foreground flowers and changed their color from orange to red as I thought the red brought them into the foreground better. I finished the outbuildings and had to use some gesso in them because they began to disappear.  I began selecting tree shapes from the print and painting them in as well as the greenish hill forms that ran across the paper. Note that I painted the shapes that were in the print and did not add my own. This is what gives this a stenciled cut out appearance.

In the third step, I filled in the tree shapes, brightened the moon and furthur accentuated the foreground flowers and leaf shapes.

In the final stage, I balanced the white in the moon with adding white rice paper flowers to the bushes that looked like a dark blobs in the foreground. I also painted in all the little printed shapes in the open meadow area in front of the outbuildings. This exercise is fun but very time consuming and really tugs at your ability to be creative.

Joshua Sellers has posted this painting along with a Haiku by Issa. I am becoming more and more interested in Haiku by following this blog.

Beth Parker has tried this same technique using fluid acrylic paints here.