SHOSHIVILLE BY MOONLIGHT – NEGATIVE WATERCOLOUR HOUSES

I have been planning to do a quirky houses negative painting for a while, and made a collection of drawings in my designs and patterns book for reference.

This drawing was quite a complicated one to do, and I hit one or two roadblocks along the way, but in the end I am satisfied with it.

The initial drawing

For this negative watercolour, I decided to map out the whole thing from the outset, because I knew it would be complicated, and I might get a bit lost otherwise.

I marked each element with the number of its layer to help me out, but as the work progressed, I soon departed from this and it didn’t really help in the long run.

The first wash

Unfortunately the next photo came out really out of focus and I didn’t realise until it was too late, and I had added further layers, so I could not re-photograph it. However, it only shows the initial wash, and the detail is not critical.

I deliberately coloured the bottom portion green, as I knew this would be a grassy area in my finished painting. I also drew a circle at top right, so that I would remember to leave this unpainted, to represent the moon.

The second layer

This came out a bit too dark, so I ended up lifting some of the paint from the second layer of houses. It also showed the first layer of houses, which were coloured only by the initial wash, to be much brighter than I expected, so later on I added a bit more colour to these to make less contrast.

Also, my initial pencil lines were rapidly disappearing, so I decided to go over them with a fine permanent ink pen – they would be outlined eventually anyway, and this way I was able to see much better what I was doing.

The third layer

You can see what a difference it made, lifting some colour from the houses in layer two.

The fourth layer

This is where I have darkened the houses in the first layer, and I also darkened the grass portion and added some detail.

Adding the ink detail

This was a fun part to do – adding lots of detail on the houses. Different styled roofs, lots of windows. I also added walls and fences above the grass. This photo is a bit brighter than how it was in real life, but you can see a better approximation of the true colours in the final photo.

Finishing touches

To complete the painting, I added some more watercolour to the houses in the form of shading, and some colour to the roofs. I also added more dark detail to the grass, and some colour to the green area behind.

To complete the painting, I applied some diluted Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed Proof White with a very fine brush for the stars, and for some lighted windows. Afterwards I touched up the edges of the windows with a fine black marker pen where the white had gone over a little. Finally I added some detail to the moon, and a bit of a halo around it with more Bleed Proof White, blending it in with water.

It’s really hard to give a completely accurate rendition of this with a photo – the sky is actually a very dark blue, being a mixture of ultramarine and lunar black. The picture is quite dark, and I hope I have captured something of a moonlit night.

I was tempted to overlay some gold trees, but I wasn’t sure how this would look. I really didn’t want to ruin the painting, so I taped a piece of transparent plastic over the painting, and experimented on that, using my fine-tipped gold Posca acrylic marker. I decided that the gold trees added nothing of benefit to the painting and in fact would have ruined it! This was a great way of trying something out without risk!

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