This project was about exploring the medium and a variety of techniques.
Exercise 1: Unusual brush marks
Task: Select a variety of household brushes, then paint tree shapes and clouds
Use smooth and rough paper and compare
First try: Blue tones
I used two sheets, first a smooth paper (left image), then a rough paper (right image). I find the marks on the rough paper more interesting than those on the smooth paper, but this may be also a result of how I handled the brushes.
The houshold brushes I found make much too irregular marks, and I found them not helpful for depicting clouds from memory. For this exercise, I would need some photographs or go outside and look at clouds, then try to depict what I see. I’m not very inventive otherwise. While the marks look quite interesting, there’s no resemblance with clouds. I think the difficulty is that one doesn’t paint clouds, but rather their background to make them come off white against the sky. I can’t do this from memory. Maybe because I haven’t paid attention to clouds for a while.
The experiment on the rough paper might eventually work as clouds if I protected the patterns with a resist and made a dark blue wash for the sky on top of it. And the marks I made resemble much more to water than to a sky. So my conclusion would be that unusual brush marks in blue might be very interesting for water, too. For sky, I don’t know. Maybe I can make a better judgement once I have tried to depict a real sky.
Maybe I should just do some mark making experiments without thinking about clouds, just to learn something more about the effects that are possible. Somehow the task of focusing on clouds was more a hindrance than helping to explore the tools.
I think the marks from unusual instruments will be more interesting for trees. For example, tree bark is very irregular and the overall shape of trees and their foliage is very irregular, too. So maybe the technique will be more successful with trees.
Second try: Green tones – for trees
I made another two sheets, the first on smooth and the second on rough paper.
Somehow this exercise didn’t work for me. Like clouds, I can’t paint trees from memory, but I do like the mark-making aspect of the task. The marks are very nice, and I would like to continue and explore how they look if applied in layers. I’m quite sure that the resulting patterns would be useful when painting a landscape.
I especially like the white which is left out from the marks I made. It creates beautiful and mysterious shapes. And strange again, the results of the experiment looks more interesting on rough paper than on smooth paper.
I might have done a third try in brown tones for the stems of trees, because my greens are rather for creating leaves and overall shapes. Rough, irregular marks in brown tones should be very nice for tree bark.
I was also thinking of doing a “tree project”, taking a walk outside and drawing interesting trees on my way. I might combine this with some watercolour experiments. Or take photos and experiment at home, this might be easier than carrying the watercolour equipment with me.
Reworking the trees
But instead of doing separate sheets for stems, I reworked the two green sheets and added some brown irregular marks to represent tree stems. As I expected, the trees look quite artificial. I think I prefer painting after nature, rather than from memory. If the idea is to try out new marks, I’d rather have my mind free to experiment and watch, instead of mimicking objects. But maybe I’m just silly. I should have worked after photograph or gone outside to make the exercise interesting and rewarding for me, instead of completing the task in such a superficial way and complaining about uninteresting results.
Another try at clouds and trees
I did a Google image search for photos of clouds, trees and tree barks and used these as inspiration for another go at the expercise. I made two more sheeds with blue cloud-type marks. The first one (left image, soft paper) was just using some brush marks. The second one (right image, rough paper) was covered made with some unusual brush marks first and then I protected some areas using a guache resist. After everything had dried, I laid a dark blue wash on top and later washed off the gouache. The result were some white and lighter blue areas where the gouache had protected the ground
There is not enough contrast and colour intensity in these pictures, maybe this comes from using study watercolours rather than artist watercolours. If I were to do it again, I would apply the pigment more concentrated.
I also had another go for the trees, on rough paper. I reworked this painting several times, with many layers in different green tones, beginning in light yellow and getting more and more into darker green tones. I was surprised how many layers of watercolour were necessary to achieve at leas moderate saturation. I also noticed that patience was important: One layer with irregular marks had to dry first, before applying the next, because otherwise the new paint would destroy the structure of marks.
Overall, I like this second attempt where I had photographs as inspiration much better than the first. I also realized that I began looking at trees and clouds in the real world much more attentively, as if I was going to draw them. For example, I discovered that the white areas of clouds are where the sunlight shines on them, whereas the darker areas are those lying in shadow. I also looked at some trees. When I was driving the car but waiting at a red light, I observed some trees in back light from the sun which somehow seems to reverse the order of dark and light greens, like the light green leaves are in the background of the shape, while the dark green leaves are in the foreground, closer to the observer. I don’t think I would want to draw clouds or trees from memory, but I am quite interested in drawing or painting them outside, or after a photograph if not otherwise possible.
Exercise: Using various brushes
The task was to make irregular brush marks with various brushessa and then lift off the colour from half of the sheet of paper using some cloth or paper towel. The first two sheets were made on dry paper, the third on wet (damp) paper. On all sheets, the left half is the area where colour was lifted off.
First: simple thick painting brush (3 cm)
Second: toothbrush
Third: thin broad painting brush (5 cm)
Obervations: The pattern of the paper towel which is used to lift off the colour is printed into the wet paint in the respective area on the left half, this looks a bit strange. The paper towel created a dot pattern in a lighter tone than the dark violet which I used as premixed colour. By contrast, the areas where I didn’t employ the paper towel are quite homogeneous in tone and texture.
By contrast, on damp paper (third experiment), the paper towel lifted off almost all the colour pigment. Surprisingly, this time the unaffected right half of the sheet produces the more irregular and interesting result because of internal structure in the coloured marks.
Overall, I wasn’t overly comfortable with this technique. For me, the darker tones are precious because they need a lot of pigment. So the idea of first applying a lot of pigment and then taking it off again seems like a waste of material to me. Maybe I’d prefer to employ this technique to correct errors, rather than as an artistic technique.
Exercise: Other tools for watercolour
First task: Blotting and wiping
Observation: Removing colour with a dry sponge did not work, so I used a wet sponge and this produced quite impressive structures which indeed resembled clouds.
First sheet: seascape in blue tones, working in multiple layers
Two more sheets: Taking off wet paint with a scrunched up paper towel (dark purple tone)
In the second of these sheets (right image), I experimented with multiple layers to create depth and more intense colours. I employed a cleaning rug to lift off colour. It didn’t produce interesting marks when applied dry, but when wet it created structures that remind me of ice crystals.
Second task: Surfaces and textures
Three techniques are employed: Clingfilm, Salt crystals, and scarifying /scraping /texturing
Clingfilm: A4 sheet, dark purple tone. Put aside with a heavy book on top to let dry for several hours as recommended. Regarding next day: this looks impressive, reminds me of broken winter ice I often saw on the sidearms of the river Spree in Berlin.
Salt crystals: two A4 sheets, dark purple colour. First with French ‘Sel Marin’, consisting mainly of large grains. The second with a mixture of the rough salt and fine kitchen salt to experiment with the effects.
Observation: The salt seems to soak up the pigment, little white areas with a dark center are the result. They look like little daisy flowers on a meadow. The second sheet with the salt mixture looks more organic, maybe like a biological texture under the microscope.
Scarifying, scraping and texturing
First sheet (left side): sandpaper
- Applied before paint: I used rough sandpaper and where it was applied, the colour sank deeply in and produced very dark tones.
- Applied after paint: Recovers the white background, creates a torn-off effect
- Overpainting again intensifies the dark marks. A very irregular effect. I think this would look nice in a landscape painting, for example to depict earth or fields at a distance.
Second sheet (right side): graphic cutter knife, hard pencil
- Knife applied before paint: produced a similar effect to sandpaper, in that the colour sank deeply into the scratched marks. But the knife creates deeper and more linear marks, whereas the sandpaper marks are broader and lighter
- Knife applied after colour: creates fine linear mark, doesn’t lift off the colour to show white background
- Hard pencil: creates deep linear marks
