Today’s experiment:

I felt I needed some direction lately so I dipped my toe once again into some of Paul Klee’s writings. One principle that I was happy to recall was his idea that process is more important than form. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but it helped me with today’s composition.

My process today:

I began with my yellows, which lately I have coupled with the idea of the past. The initial set of wavy yellow watercolor lines that I laid down first did not suggest any further visual marks. I decided to insert a spot of purple in a hole surrounded by lemon yellow and blue in the midst of an yellow/orange field.

The lemon yellow and yellow/orange washes combined to form some interesting low contrast forms. As you can see below, there are three dark forms within the yellow. I put in the dark square for balance.

In previous compositions in this series I had a lot of luck with contrasting colors, particularly opaque oil paint. This proved to be the next step in my process with today’s study.

I don’t have a palette for watercolors so I applied the blue oil color directly to the paper. I used a palette knife and brush to spread it around, leaving a triangular open space, again to balance the composition. I scrubbed off some of the blue and dabbed some lemon yellow in its place.

Finally, I used an india ink, fine tip pen to extend the legs of the triangle back into the picture.

Something unforeseen always happens in each of my studies. In this case, I went to brush something away from the apex of the white triangle and smudged a bit of the blue into the space.  I think it works. At least it doesn’t detract.