I started this new watercolor a few days ago, using a piece of watercolor canvas glued to a piece of corrugated cardboard. Watercolor canvas is interesting stuff. When you first start to paint on it, it’s almost water resistant. You have to go over it with plain water to condition it a little before you start painting. And the paint doesn’t soak in right away, so if you don’t have it fastened to something to keep it flat, it will curl up and the paint will slide all over the place, which can create some interesting effects, if that’s what you’re after. Anyway, it’s one of those surfaces, a little like Yupo, where it helps to let the “layers” dry before you start to work on the next bit.
Just the starting point
Apparently, it will be a sunset
Before I did this one, I had decided to experiment a little on a smaller, leftover piece of canvas that I had glued to a piece of poster board. Poster board is too flimsy for this purpose, as I discovered. I had to tape the edges down to keep the painting flat. My “experiment” is turning into a landscape. I started off just covering the whole surface with a shade of blue with some greens mixed in, but most of it turned out blue enough to pass for sky.
This just sort of evolved
As I added more green I realized I was making some “tree shapes.” So I made some more tree shapes — more conifer-y, because they looked like the right shapes for that particular color. After that layer dried, I mixed up the old standby — burnt sienna and ultramarine blue — and added the humpy bit to the left of the trees. Kind of looks like a hill. Later I added a thinner wash of the same colors to make another hill look more distant. Another feature of watercolor canvas that’s different from paper is that as you add new layers of wash, the layer underneath comes loose and blends with the new. So if that’s not what you’re after, you have to use a light touch. The blue that blended in a little with my second hill gave it a misty/hazy look. I added a deeper, more olive shade of green in the foreground, and “poof,” instant landscape. I may add some more details, just to see what else might show up. And I will chart the progress of both projects here.
