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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

An interesting Watercolor Technique


'Meadow Walk'         11x14       pastel        ©Karen Margulis
available $165
 I think I will call it Watercolor Overpainting!  I'm sure you have heard of watercolor underpainitng for pastels. I love starting a pastel painting with a watercolor underpainting. But I unearthed an old painting that reminded me of another way to use watercolor with pastels. Water color splattered on top of the pastels! Take a closer look:

close up of watercolor splatters
The white and pink flower marks are really watercolor spots. To do this I painted my meadow and red poppies with pastels. I wanted to add a suggestion of smaller less distinct flowers. I loaded my paintbrush with watercolor and I tapped the brush over the lower meadow in my painting. (I covered the area that I didn't want to splatter with a piece of paper) I did use some white gouache to mix with my watercolor to make the colors more opaque.

It was a fun effect and I must try it again!! It is fun the things you discover when you play!


Today's painting was an older one and although I liked the flowers there was much that could have been better! I made some corrections and you can see them in the revised painting at the top of this post!

Before reworking the painting. See details of the changes on my Patreon page.



1 comment:

robertsloan2art said...

I love the way you do things like those spatters. You used them for snow in an earlier column too and that one was gorgeous. This is fantastic for those weird little indistinct flowers that turn up between large recognizable ones. There's dozens of species in every area, hard to tell apart without a magnifier and huge botanical library. Today's is beautiful.