I decided to ease back into watercolor this year. A while ago I poured some latex watercolor resist (frisket) onto a 12×16″ block of watercolor paper. On each occasion that I passed by the studio, I saw the frisket design and thought about how to develop it. On new year’s day I started painting. When […]
Before I began this sketch, I thought of the round-headed characters that are so prevalent in the work of Paul Klee (i.e., Error on the Green, Senecio, Pierrot Lunaire). I drew the head with fine lines of a watery liquid frisket; I created a circular patch with a thicker frisket, that I envisioned to be […]
I drew the white lines on the composition below with latex masking fluid (also called frisket). When dry, the traces of frisket resist the absorption of watercolors. I flooded the space between the latex tracks with different colors. I had an idea of the final appearance of this composition but did not know for certain […]
Below is the first stage of an abstract design I had in mind. I wanted to try a line sketch that was spread out instead of being spring loaded with curves, coils or other involutions. I did the line drawing with latex resist (frisket). I’m still thinking about what to do next on this one…
I began this study with free form strokes of my liquid latex frisket. The frisket resists watercolors and leaves paper white when removed. The frisket also does not allow permanent marker traces to bleed through. I used markers to cross hatch the area around the dried liquid latex, so the areas would be accentuated. Then I […]
There’s a lot going on in the painting below. I first drew a free-form design in pencil and continued it with masking fluid. I used this fluid to fill in some of the shapes that were formed by the overlapping pencil work. I started with Payne’s gray and washed a portion of the top of […]
I combined free-form pen and ink curves with negative-space lines that I drew with masking fluid. The term ‘negative-space line’ seems oxymoronic, since a line has virtually no width dimension. I define ‘space’ on a two-dimensional surface as a bounded shape. I used the inked lines to form the edges of color fields. The white […]
I begin many of my compositions lately by applying thin beads of frisket, a masking fluid, which can be painted over after it is dry. After the paint is dried, the frisket is removed, revealing the white of the paper. Frisket lines become white lines. I did not have a figuration in mind when I […]
With today’s composition, I’ve reached the limit of my frisket-and-shake technique, at least for regular patterns (see Netted). The graph-like overlay on the painted area resulted from shaking the liquid masking (frisket) that I applied in closely-spaced parallel lines. The design includes some very dark areas. A bit of overspill from my ink bottle, poured […]
I drew narrow traces of masking fluid with a wide-gage hollow applicator. The gage wasn’t narrow enough to allow a smooth outflow. The fluid bunched up and formed a bead at regular intervals across the page. Once I shook the paper at 90 degrees to the direction of the parallel lines, the beads turned into […]
