Today’s watercolor experiment:

I was trying to draw portraits today. I didn’t use scrap paper or sketch paper. Instead I used my good watercolor paper. It was disastrous. I erased the whole thing, except for bits here and there.

Painting over another painting or drawing (with some remnants of the original still visible after the ‘second coat’ ) is called ‘pentimento’.  The idea of wasting paper is anathema to me, I reused my already-sketched-upon paper for today’s watercolor.

My underlying portraits failed in many ways: details of facial features; relative scale and placement of said features; overall shapes and sizes of the heads.  Why waste an almost perfectly good sheet of watercolor paper when I could release some energy creating an abstract piece while also practicing the rendering of face parts?

I can’t think of a reason.

Below is my salvaged watercolor sheet, semi-complete with face parts: