Clusters and Swirls

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Clusters and Swirls, 6.5″x4.25″ watercolor on handmade postcard

I’ve been experimenting a lot with my watercolors this weekend, and I think this is the most successful of the oddities I finished. I loved the warm orange-gold, dotted with little hints of rose, even before I got out the reds and started playing around with the idea of clusters and filaments again. I tried not to be too precious about things, just painting whatever came to mind, making patterns and then breaking them. When I was done there was still something missing, so I took a different shade of red and put in the swirls, and that really brought the whole piece together for me.

I tend to like working with pure pigments more than mixing sometimes, though I’m trying to move myself away from that tendency. The background was definitely a mix of different colors blended wet-in-wet on the paper, but all the foreground details were done with two pure Japanese inks, one in a deep bloody red and the other in a bright fire-engine red.

One cool thing about getting more serious about making art every single day is that I’m using up a ton of art supplies I’ve hoarded over the years. I’ve probably had these handmade postcards from India for over a decade, they’re thick and stiff like cardstock with an interesting and uneven texture that varies between watercolor paper and canvas.

Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art
Tags: for sale, postcard, watercolor