I’ve been painting a lot of backgrounds lately. The first one was entitled, Just Background, and gave me an opportunity to practice my glazing techniques. This composition was inspired by another sketch I did, which juxtaposed green trees and blue sky (Wireless?). I decided to to continue practicing washing and glazing.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

I began my watercolor study today with latex resist. I dripped it on the paper and formed comma-like shapes by spreading it with my finger. After drying, I painted blotches of Hooker’s green and Shadow Green (Holbein) on the lower left hand side and a Prussian blue wash on the right. I wet the entire paper beforehand. I used a more concentrated Prussian blue to accentuate the border of the latex-resist figures.

I glazed several more times with lemon yellow on the left side and Prussian blue on the right. At one point, I used sap green to outline some of the darker green spots, on wet paper. I also used one wash of viridian green on the left side.

I removed some of the pigment from the blue-green border and dropped in some lemon yellow. I applied lines of cerulean blue to follow the contours of the latex shapes on dry paper. After a final wash of Prussian blue, I removed the latex and painted the shapes with cadmium orange.

Here is the result:

Could this be anything other than an aerial view of goldfish in a pond? I admit, this is what I had in mind, but perhaps it can be classified as an abstract expressionistic work.