I bought another bottle of masking fluid, as I rush back to my comfort zone. See yesterday’s posts (Nostalgia, Gaining More Comfort) for studies I’ve done with discomfort.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Process:

I love my new masking fluid (also called frisket). It is much thinner than the liquid latex I was using. Here is my first pour:

Abstract 060315 Stage 1

I had some success with some of my underused watercolors, recently: opera rose and cobalt teal in Less Ink. Today I used pigments from the red portion of my paint box: carmine (Daniel Smith), cadmium red light (M. Graham), opera rose (Winsor Newton), permanent red deep (MaimeriBlu) and rose of ultramarine (Daniel Smith).

My plan was to use gradations of red to surround the traces of the frisket and, apply different shades of complementary colors after I removed the mask. Note below that the red shades run the gamut from a red/purple to a very light pink.

Abstract 060315 Stage 2

Here is the composition with the masking fluid removed:

Abstract 060315 Stage 3

For the final step, I used cobalt teal to paint the white traces in field of opera rose. I surrounded two sides of this area of pink with shades of yellow. The yellow strip is adjacent to the field of rose of ultramarine, the purple-hued area.  I surrounded the rest of this field with yellow. Where the white strip separated purple from red, I merged a thalo yellow green, next to the carmine red field, with lemon yellow, next to the purple field, thus providing contrast that results from abutting complementary colors to each other.

I used a dark Prussian blue to cover the rightmost trace, to balance the dark area on the right side of the composition. I merged each end of the Prussian blue trace with the yellow trace to gain the green transition color.

Here is the final rendition of today’s experiment:

Abstract 060315
12″x16″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Comment:

I learned that cadmium red light applies very smoothly to the paper, carmine and permanent deep red are very similar colors. Cobalt teal doesn’t mix very well with yellow and Prussian blue is almost black when applied heavily.

I do like the design and the way my new frisket responds to the shaking and tilting of the paper. I can get extremely fine lines. This quality would make it the perfect tool to preserve very small areas of white in representational scenes that have reflections or other finely detailed areas of white.