Today’s watercolor experiment:

Today’s study is a continuation of yesterday’s look at granulated watercolor pigments.

Wet on dry:

As opposed to yesterday, I applied the watercolors to dry paper. I used Van Dyke brown which merged seamlessly with the Moonglow, a specialized pigment from Daniel Smith. The latter color separates into red and purple as it dries. I left an interruption in the horizontal sweep of the Van Dyke brown.

Separated from the brownish swath of color, I painted a strip of ultramarine blue and then an adjacent field of cobalt teal. I allowed them to merge.

Color in the spaces:

I used opaque colors (Sennelier yellow and cadmium red light) to fill in the white spaces. I used a mixture to create the orange color in the middle space.

Glaze:

The only transparent color I used was lemon yellow, which I used to glaze a triangular area, abutting but not covering the cadmium red but encompassing most of the granular pigments. Only a small patch of the original ultramarine blue shows through.

Comment:

I enjoy approaching watercolors from the point of view of testing the qualities of different pigments and how they interact. However, I do hope to apply the results of my testing to an emotive expression of my imagination.

(Note how I shy away from the term ‘self expression’. I am still smarting from a critique of the definition of art as expression of the self.)