Watercolor Painting for Dummies (22 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
You
spatter
with a wet paintbrush and the flick of your wrist. Some artists have made a career out of flinging paint around in this manner. Spatter is more irregular than spray, which may be why it’s also known as
fly specking.
Spatter is good for foregrounds of weeds and foliage or abstract texture. You can also use a toothbrush to spatter dark dots in a foreground for interesting texture.
You can spatter with a variety of brushes:
Any watercolor brush
can be loaded with dripping paint and flicked.
An old toothbrush
flicked with a thumbnail produces a fine spray. The upcoming project explains the technique more fully. Don’t use your good toothbrush or someone else’s. You should replace that one every three to four months; so instead of tossing it, recycle it into your paint kit.
Specialty tools
that look like a bottle brush make perfect spatter, and are, in fact, advertised as spatter brushes.
The fine points of spattering, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, are as follows:
1.
Pick up a juicy amount of paint in your brush.
Most brushes work for this technique. Try several to compare.
2.
Hold the brush handle at the end opposite the hairs with the paint-loaded hairs pointing up.
3.
Make a quick downward motion with your wrist so the paint flies off the hairs onto the paper.
Hopefully your paper catches most of the spray, but you may want to wear an apron and cover the furniture for protection.
Sometimes the paint drips. If you don’t want a big drip on your painting, try spattering with the paper in a vertical position leaned up against something. That way you don’t have to contort your wrist quite as far and the drips will land on the table instead of your painting. Most watercolor wipes up with water, but be sure to protect your table if needed.
Here’s a trick to help spatter only go where you want it: Have several old towels in your watercolor painting kit. Washcloths or hand towels are perfect so long as they’re dry and clean — never mind the stains. Lay them over the areas of the painting you want to protect from flying spatter. Then spatter. If the paint is too wet, it may soak through the towels, so use a little restraint.
The following steps show you a great trick for creating the look of granite, snowflakes, speckled enamel, or stars in the sky. As an example, I painted an enamel coffeepot as part of a still life. You need an old toothbrush, soap, masking fluid (discussed earlier in this chapter), paper, and paint.
1.
Dip the old toothbrush in the liquid soap or rub it on a bar of soap to coat the bristles.
2.
Dip the toothbrush in liquid masking fluid without rinsing the soap off.
Shake the excess masking fluid off into the container to avoid drips. If dripping is still a problem, avoid drips on your flat paper by holding the paper vertically or by using an easel while spattering so the drips land on the table or floor instead of your paper. If you want to protect those surfaces, try newspaper.
3.
Hold the toothbrush near the bristles and draw the thumbnail of the same hand through the bristles so the mask sprays off the brush onto the paper (see Figure 4-8).
Figure 4-8:
Using a toothbrush to spatter.
4.
Let the dots of liquid mask dry.
5.
Remove any dots you don’t want.
Did you get a big drop by accident? Not to worry. Just rub the dry mask dot to remove.
6.
Repeat Steps 3, 4, and 5 if you want more dots.
7.
Paint watercolor over the top of the dry mask dots (see Figure 4-9).
I simulated the coffeepot’s navy blue enamel using Payne’s gray and ultramarine blue.
Figure 4-9:
Painting watercolor over the mask.
8.
Let the paint dry completely.
9.
Remove the mask.
Figure 4-10 shows a closeup of what my coffeepot looked like after I removed the masking fluid.
Figure 4-10:
The speckled enamel effect on the coffeepot.
10.
Touch up as needed.
For my coffeepot, I toned down some of the dots by painting the white area with a little more watercolor. Depending on what you’re painting and what you want to accomplish, you can paint over the white dots, you can soften edges by nudging them with a bristle brush, or you can leave them alone. You are the master of this technique’s destiny. Figure 4-11 shows you what I ended up with in the final still life.
Figure 4-11:
Spattered mask helps create the look of an old coffeepot in this still life.
