Sometimes I have to strain to come up with a post. That’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to get to a place where I do not have a daily goal, especially since my retirement. I had planned to work but ran smack into: 1) the economy; 2) ageism, especially here in Silicon Valley.  I am proud to have had an uninterrupted streak of posts for more than two years. Thinking of things to say keeps me reading, questioning, making art and sharing with you wonderful readers.  Struggling now and then is a small price to pay, and well worth it.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

I could not think of a subject for today’s experiment. I did a watercolor portrait of Joy, my wife, this morning. It was terrible. I will henceforth go back to the drawing board until I can make a pencil portrait that bears at least some resemblance to a specific person (hopefully one that I intended to draw).

So I tried another tack.

I wet my watercolor paper with three concentric rings of water. I infused the middle ring with lemon yellow, the middle ring with Winsor red and the outer ring with indanthrone blue. The fun began when I connected the rings to allow the colors to mix.  I had some degree of control of the mixing through my brushstrokes but for the most part, the watercolors mixed themselves and created patterns based on the mobility of their pigments, the amount of water present and the warping of the paper. Even though I work with a watercolor block, which consists of paper glued down on four sides, it can still buckle when soaked with water, creating valleys or channels through which the colors can flow.

Here is today’s study:

Rings
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

 Comment:

After the first mixture of watercolors dried, I wet the entire paper and applied colors in the same order as before, yellow in the middle; red as a middle ring; and dark blue on the periphery. This enabled me to achieve richer tones through the layering of the colors.

In this kind of watercolor, the artist chooses the color combinations, the wetness of the paper and his or her degree of manipulating the flow, but the lion’s share of the work is done by the watercolors themselves. The wonderful thing about letting watercolors do what they will is the resulting image can contain meaning, even though it was not planned.