Got the itch to do some painting lately. I found a cute hummingbird tutorial on YouTube so gave it a try. Might make this into a birthday card.
While on YouTube I found a very interesting video about a "negative painting technique". This is supposed to be good when trying to reproduce a photograph which is right up my alley. Basically the background is painted first - layer on layer until you get to the most important part.
I decided to give that a try. The ugly stuff you see in the early shots is some watercolor mask I used to cover up the main images while I painted the back ground. The masking stuff was no longer fluid and I should have thrown it out and bought some new stuff but as usual I was in a hurry so I used it anyway. It worked - sort of.
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| Sketched a couple of passion flowers and stems them covered them up with masking gunk. |
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| Covered paper with lots of water and dropped in some yellow and blue and let it blend to get shades of green. Then sketched in more stems and leaves and painted around them. |
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| Added another layer to the background using lots of the blue to darken it and added a few more leaves. |
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| Added detail to the leaves and started adding color to a few of the stems. (I wish I had left the stems alone) |
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| Removed the masking - I really like this but I see the masking did not cover as well as I hoped. |
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| Introducing the third color - red. Lots of water gives it a pink shade and a touch of blue the purple I wanted. |
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| After the "red" dried I wanted more, but I lost the tube! Oh well - I found a tube of pink. |
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| Decided to smooth out the flowers by adding white around the edges. FINISHED! |
I think I'm done, but then again maybe not.
I'll be shopping for a new bottle of masking fluid soon and give this technique another try. I wonder what happened to that tube of red???
