A Boy and His Puppy

 10 x 13 watercolor on Arches 300 lb paper

Super happy with this one! My watercolors are usually like all my other pieces - too rigid and a lot of attention to detail. But, this time I managed to back off and let the paint do its thing. Not easy. Not for me anyway.

As I've mentioned before, I'm doing a lot of playing this month. I've gotten back to drawing basics, and also experimenting with the paints and supplies I have on hand that I don't pay enough attention to. Watercolor is one of those supplies. 

Here are a few of my playtime experiments:

Here I applied masking fluid, with a palette knife,  to a 5"x7" piece of watercolor paper, .

Then, using a very wet brush, dabbed in some color and sprinkled on some chunky salt. 

(I was pulling out all the stops!)

Once it all dried, I removed the masking fluid. I'm sorry I don't have the photo before I started drawing on it, but here's what happened when I pulled out a photo of my grandson, that I had recently received, and started laying down some color with my old Prismacolor Art Stix. I don't think they're still available, but Prismacolor pencils would give the same result.

In the end I had this 5x7 study. With all this wonderful experience, I decided to do a "real" one. 

So once again I got out the masking fluid and palette knife, but this time I started with a light pencil drawing on heavy Arches watercolor paper, and before using the palette knife technique, I applied the liquid mask, with a small brush, to areas of highlight where I wanted to maintain the white of the paper. After all the masking fluid was dry, I laid in watercolor, using a very wet technique, in colors more in line with the image. Here is what it looked like when the masking fluid was removed.

Below -  I was getting excited!

Here I was super excited and very afraid of messing it up. I didn't want to over-do and lose the freshness and flow of the watercolor! The problem was, I didn't feel he had enough contrast in his face. Oh no! If I was gonna mess up it was gonna be the face. I let it sit for an extra day while I built some courage.

The finished piece is at the top. The face isn't perfect, but I managed to not tighten up terribly. I definitely had a lot of fun doing this and can imagine more watercolors coming up in my future.

Thanks for stopping by!