After a pencil drawing and a painting yesterday, today it's time to give those inktense…
Warming Up With Collibrina
I was going through my folders of watercolour paintings yesterday, tidying them up ready for an art and craft fair later this month. And I found one painting that I’d detached from the block with an empty page behind it. So I separated the empty page. But what to do with it? I didn’t want to do a watercolour painting on it because, no longer being attached to a block, the paint would buckle all over the place. So I thought I’d try the Artgraf paints out on it.
Being a sheet of watercolour paper that wasn’t going to end up with a watercolour painting, this felt like a free life, so I thought I’d just go crazy and loose. I started with the blocks on their edges, mapping out very rough, loose shapes. Blue everywhere first then some red on the shadowy bits on the left and yellow on the lighter bits on the right. Then I drew on an outline with the corner of a dark brown block, trying to only look at my source photo and ignoring what was on the paper. And then I put on water, moving around from place to place and trying not to drag colours into each other, except in places where I wanted string shadows.
And that was me done. A rubbish painting but (i) look at that ugly granulation: this was on rough watercolour paper and I’m wondering whether Artgraf paints might be better suited to hotpress paper (the smoothest there is). And (ii) I feel suitably loosened up now for some serious watercolour painting…
The model today was Collibrina, making her debut. I chose a simple pose, befitting the loose nature of this exercise.
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