NEGATIVE WATERCOLOURS – HOLEY MOLEY

This was how my earlier negative watercolour “Filaments” was supposed to look (but with different colours) but it had a life of its own and went in its own direction before I could stop it!! Here’s my attempt to put it right.

The initial drawing

With this one, I allowed more space between the initial shapes. You can see that I have also drawn the shapes for layer 2 at this stage.

Layer 1

For this initial wash I used my Kuretake Art Nouveau paints, and my new dagger brush. This paintbrush is fabulous for making all kinds of marks, and also very thin lines as one edge of it comes to a fine point. I bought two of these dagger brushes recently on AliExpress. After the paint was dry, I used a darker purple from the Kuretake set to add some spatters but most of these disappeared as I added further layers.

As the work progressed, I moved over to my regular watercolours, because the Kuretake ones are mostly pastel shades, and I couldn’t get them dark enough.

Layer 2

For this layer, I followed what was already there, and merely darkened the marks, still using the Kuretake set.

Layer 3

This was where I started to use my regular watercolours. Again, I darkened the existing marks as far as I was able.

Layers 4 and 5

By this stage things were getting darker, and layer 1 was looking a bit too pale. I therefore darkened it a little. I darkened the lower layers to give the illusion of depth, and added drop shadows. At this stage I was able to remove the tape.

Completing the painting

I added the final layer (layer 6) freehand, as I had done with the “Filaments” painting. I needed to do further work on the shadows, and also decided to give the top layer a bit more dimension by adding some shading around the edges of the holes. Washing back the hard edges did darken the whole layer still further, but not sufficiently do cause problems. The whole thing was beginning to look like rust, which was not my intention – a happy accident! To complete the painting I spattered it with some black paint, but as it dried, the spatters faded too much, so I went over them with a black marker pen.

Although this one came out a bit different from how I intended or expected, I am very pleased with the result. There was a stage when I thought it wasn’t going to work at all, but one has to push through the “ugly phase” of every picture and have confidence that all will be well in the end! A lot of my dagger brush marks disappeared along the way, but the general effect is still visible.