Today’s watercolor experiment:

In my recent watercolor experiments (Autumn Sky, Discontinuous Bird of Paradise, Amorphia), I wet the paper and painted fields of color. I dripped clear water into these fields and watched as it chased the color away leaving a starburst of white. Today I performed the inverse of this procedure. I wet the paper down with clear water and dripped colored ink on the white paper.

The colored ink spots grew and filled in the crannies created by the grain of the paper. It was fun to watch as the spot grew and reticulated. It seemed organic, in the sense that it reminded me of a cellular organism.

Detail: Ink Blots Orange and Blue
Reticulation

The orange-colored ink (burnt umber) spread out to make wonderful patterns, wicked by the wet paper and the rough texture.

Different inks:

Blue and orange are complementary colors. I placed the three burnt umber drips on the paper first. This is a Winsor Newton, water-soluble ink. The next spots I applied were from my bottle of dark blue(Winsor Newton) calligraphy ink. Perhaps its waterproof characteristic has some bearing on the different way it disperses. Maybe the pigment is more finely ground in this ink, accounting for the smooth, non reticulating spread.

To eliminate the possibility that the color blue itself disperses more smoothly, I dripped in a Winsor Newton ultramarine blue, of the same type as the burnt umber (not calligraphy ink). Reticulation recurred.

Ink Blots Orange and Blue
9″x12″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

Comment:

I like the way the waterproof dark blue in the vicinity of the burnt umber blot did not mix (in the two lower blots). The result was the creation of an edge between two complementary colors and to set up the orange as foreground with the blue receding into the background.

This study reminds a gathering of nanoparticles. The spots could be cells or little animacules (as first seen by van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope).

I would like to find a methodical way to experiment with the interactions between waterproof and water-soluble inks. I suppose this means many more daily watercolor experiments.