Today’s watercolor experiment:

I began today’s experiment by applying frisket to my watercolor paper. Frisket, also known as masking fluid or ‘drawing gum’ prevents watercolors from being absorbed into the paper.  Frisket is usually painted in specific areas that the painter intends to keep white. Since watercolors are mainly transparent, white pigment painted over another pigment does not stay white. This is the reason watercolor painters talk about ‘preserving the white of the paper’. This may be done by carefully painting around spaces intended to be white or applying frisket to these spaces.

In many of my abstract experiments I manipulate the liquid frisket by tilting the paper to control where it flows. Joy, my wife, suggested that I use some of my ‘canned air’ to move the frisket around. That’s what I did today.

Below is stage one of today’s study. I removed the frisket after applying two washes of a very dark blue (indanthrone blue).

Cosmic Chicken – Stage 1

Some very fine lines were produced, as you can see. Joy mentioned that the big white spot looks like one of the chickens we see at a gas station we go to sometimes.

I decided to apply the colors I had in mind yesterday to this composition. I chose the colors carmine and lemon yellow, carmine to the center of the white space and yellow around the edges.

Cosmic Chicken
12″x16″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Comment:

It must seem obvious to everyone, as it is to me, that this is a representation of chicken of gigantic proportions, embedded in the cosmic firmament. Creatures such as this have been imagined in an earthy setting. They have been realized, usually as men in rubber suits traipsing around the landscape, destroying buildings, scaring the local population half to death.