WATERCOLOUR PAINTING – MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT NEGATIVE STENCILLING
While I have done negative stencilling on various mixed media projects, I have not attempted it with watercolour painting until now. I am working on a collection of negative watercolour paintings and thought that some negative stencilling would complement the theme. Eventually all these little paintings will be bound together in a book.
My first attempt – a pink landscape
It’s a funny thing with these rather abstract paintings that start off with an initial wash. Until this goes down, one cannot always tell the eventual direction the picture will go. The initial shapes determine the ultimate result. In this case, I had no idea I was going to do an abstract-style landscape – it just happened!
My small flower-shaped palette had been sitting around dirty for a while, and I thought I would use the paint in it to make this picture. There were colours in it that were mixed with Daniel Smith Mars Black as part of my granulating watercolour experiments. The result of using these was pretty grungey with loads of granulation! The initial wash was ugly, including some dark streaks caused by my brush especially at the bottom. I’m not sure how that happened because I wet the paper thoroughly before I started. They got covered up eventually.
You can see the extreme granulation in the above photo. As far as I remember the colours mixed with the Mars Black were Permanent Rose (Winsor & Newton) and Ultramarine (also W&N) and Cerulean Blue (probably W&N but not sure about that). Anyway, it’s a right mess at this stage! Even so, there was something about it that suggested a landscape, perhaps the blue in the centre, and the shapes at the sides which might be occupied by trees.
These are the stencils I chose for this picture. I had brought down quite a few, and if I was to do a landscape, these seemed appropriate.
These were from a large collection I bought on AliExpress recently, very cheap. They seem to be fine, although I did have to push out quite a few pieces which had not been fully cut, which isn’t something I have ever had to do with more expensive stencils.
The next picture shows the first negative stencilling. This was achieved by laying the stencil down onto the painting and re-wetting the paint through it. I then took a piece of kitchen paper and rubbed through the stencil to lift the paint. Holding the stencil down at one end, I was able to lift it up to see how things were going, without moving it, so I could lay it back down to work on it further.
At this stage I also added a little dark paint to suggest a lake between the trees. The ugly marks were beginning to disappear.
The second stencilling, to form some foreground rocks, and the addition of some orange paint with my dagger brush to suggest foliage. At this stage it looked like trees on fire, which wasn’t what I really wanted!
At this stage I was about to throw it away and forget the whole idea as I really wasn’t keen! Things didn’t improve for quite a while.
Adding some tree trunks and branches, and some shading around the rocks.
The whole thing was looking far too moody and in need of some highlights, which I added with Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed Proof White, mixed with a little yellow paint from my regular watercolour set. At this stage it was definitely improving and I found myself liking it a bit more, and not wanting to throw it away. I also added some reeds and grasses is the foreground to add to the effect of the vertical streaks already in the water area, with a few white speckles for seed heads on them. Some more of the white and yellow mix for the sun (or is it the moon?!) and its reflection as well as some distant hills, completed the picture. As always, it was greatly improved by the removal of the masking tape.
This limited palette was mostly just from left-over paint from earlier granulating experiments. Nice to have used it up and cleaned the palette, and a not-too-bad picture as a result! I shall definitely be doing some more negative stencilling as it’s a fun and intriguing technique.
