Tag Archives: Puddle painting

Mystery Technique

Mystery Technique #126

May 20, 2023 – 9:39 pm

Curious about the techniques used here? You can learn more next month if you’ve signed up for email updates!

ANSWER TO MYSTERY TECHNIQUE #125, PART 2:

Watercolor pencils are a big part of this technique! Intriguing edges can form as watery paint slowly evaporates:

Here’s another part of the same painting where less is happening, and some enhancement is needed:

Because watercolor pencils can make so many different kinds of marks, they can effectively mimic what happens during evaporation. It’s fun to experiment with working on both wet and dry paper, dipping the pencil tip in water, and drawing with the side of the tip. See if you can spot the differences in this final version, which also includes the background and another layer of paint for increased depth:

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Mystery Technique

Mystery Technique #114

April 20, 2022 – 6:23 pm

Curious about the techniques used here? You can learn more next month if you’ve signed up for email updates!

ANSWER TO MYSTERY TECHNIQUE #113:

Amazing things can happen if you use lots of water on unstretched paper! Instead of drawing the edges of shapes with pencil, I defined them with plain water, blotting with a dry paper towel to make corrections. Next I added a lot more water to make the paper buckle into hills and valleys before dropping in diluted acrylic ink. As the water slowly evaporated, it left behind a record of its interaction with pigment and paper, echoing the traces water leaves behind in the landscape. After this layer dried, I added more dark to increase depth and painted the background. Can you spot the places I used watercolor pencils to mimic the linear patterns that naturally occurred?

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