Category: Work-in-Progress

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Painting Step by Step: Deliberate “Happy Accidents”

A “happy accident” in a painting is something unplanned or unintended that gives a result we like or that is interesting to work with. But I don’t have to simply wait for one to happen: I can deliberately create the conditions in which happy accidents occur, increase the odds of something intriquing happening though never having control of the outcome.

Acrylic ink is one of my favourite mediums for doing this. To do a drawing and then spray it with water. The result depends on how much ink is on the surface, how much has dried, how much water is sprayed and how close to the ink I spray it. Bonus: it freaks people out who’ve not seen it done before because it gets messy.

Here’s a photo of my final painting, before I get into the layers in it. As you can see, even though a process may be chaotic and messy, the final result need not be overtly so. The reason for doing it is that it benefits me in the making of the painting, it’s exciting and challenging in a way that colouring in a line drawing can never be.

A Piece of Portsoy Harbour.
Mixed media on A2 watercolour paper. Sold.

My first step was to do a drawing in the ink.

I could have let it dry and then add colour, but I want something that’s wilder, so sprayed it with water. (Click on a video to see it full size.)

(Click on a video to see it full size.)

The result:

I placed paper towel over the result to lift off a bit of the excess inky water.

Then I scrunched up the inky paper and stamped across the surface.

The result:

What a delightful chaotic mess to work into. It’s hard to be patient waiting for it to dry, but any wet medium added will mix in and ruin the effect, whilst coloured pencil can tear the wet surface, so I usually work on something else.

I don’t stress if my drawing has dissolved as I can always refind and redraw it. Dealing with what has happened is part of the process. I enjoy responding to what’s there and nudging it in a direction.

Next I got out my watercolours and added a layer of “harbour wall colours”.

Once this had dried, I used opaque acrylic paint to draw in the rusty ring and chains. I also added some opaque colour to some of the harbour wall stones.

Next I added a layer of coloured pencil. It’s subtle in many places, you only notice it up close.

Next layer was oil pastel, both lights and darks. The watercolour paper I’m using has a slight texture to it, which breaks up the pastel line.

I went back and forth with coloured pencil and oil pastel until I got to this point.

After pondering it for a while, I decided the darks weren’t strong enough. Time for something dramatic rather than faffing about. So I poured ink over the whole thing and sprayed this with some water.

(Click on a video to see it full size.)

Relax, remember there’s a lot of oil pastel on the surface and the ink won’t stick to that.

I left it vertical, to drip-dry overnight.

The next morning I added some light orange oil pastel to the rings, and declared the painting finished.

A Piece of Portsoy Harbour.
Mixed media on A2 watercolour paper.
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An Unexpected Painting: Feelings Bottles

My painting of bottles that I used in Monday Motivator “Snailed It” ended a long way from its starting point. It began in a workshop by the fabulous Elijah Louis Smith titled “Drawing is Fun”.

Elijah created a still life setup with an assortment of items including fresh flowers, a fake plantpot, small bust (sculpture of a head), patterned fabric, one wine bottle, and other things I don’t remember other than there was quite a selection. We drew with a variety of mediums and tools, including unlikely things to encourage experimentation. Seeing what happens instead of knowing the outcome, and layering on the same piece rather than being precious about what’s been done.

Coloured pencil was the starting point, but you’ll be hard pressed to see it in my final piece. Once inks and fluid paint were added to the table, I headed that way with two pieces, one of paper and the other on board. Elijah started moving the elements of the still life around, encouraging us to keep adding to our pieces.

At a certain point the shape of the bottle caught my attention, though I couldn’t say why. I started painting this repeatedly, always upright, then putting my two pieces right-sides together to transfer still-wet paint from one to another. Also using a brush handle to draw invisible lines on the back of the paper to encourage the transfer of paint (a monoprinting technique). Getting lost in playing with materials and responding to what was happening on impulse.

When time was up, this is what my pieces looked like:

A3 board
A3 watercolour paper

Back home, I decided to see if I could reinforce the bottle shapes, make things a bit more definite so it’s less of a colourful chaos. Using transparent colours so I wouldn’t block what was there. Purple in the background because I know this creates an interesting dark.

At a certain point my brain ran to the thought of bottling up ones feelings, possibly because I had been missing being able to tell Alistair about the afternoon. And if there were seven bottles then I could have one for each day of the week in which to put feelings aside.

Then my brain ran to the alphabet stamps bought when we were still on Skye, because preserves should be labelled. I knew where they were (unlike many other things since moving) because that drawer unit had been shifted with the contents in it (easily done because of the castors Alistair had added so I could move it around the studio). I had never used them until this month; literally years of them waiting for the right moment.

The words top right are: “Feelings Bottles”, and on the bottles “Monday, Today, Day (positioned as if the rest is hidden by the angle of the bottle), Friday, Sunday”. I avoided the longer days of the week (Wednesday, Saturday) because I wasn’t sure they’d fit in the space.

I like this endpoint, the layered colours and textures, but it was a surprise to me.

I haven’t done anything to the other piece, yet.

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Painting-in-Progress: The White Wall at Portsoy

Since moving to Portsoy last month, I’ve been enjoying a circular walk that takes me past many paintable possibilities, including ropes and creels, the new and old harbours, the rocky shores. At different times of day, and thus the light varies. (Not quite as much as the average Scottish spring though, as the weather systems are stuck on “dry and sunny”.)

I’ve begun to be obsessed by the curve of white-topped wall and railing between the old and new harbours.

There’s a fair bit going on in the background, that patchwork of buildings and chimneys, which would test my patience to paint in detail. But it not being the element that’s of interest I decided stop worrying about it and simply have a go at the wall.

I started with pencil, then Payne’s grey acrylic ink and acrylic paint, on a 30x30cm wood panel. Colours were the usual suspects: Prussian blue, oranges, white. The photo collage below shows the painting’s development.

(The lighter colours in the last photo are because it was taken the next day in a different spot, not because I suddenly lightened the tones of the whole painting.)
“The White Wall, Portsoy”, 30x30cm (12×12″), acrylic on wood panel.

I initially thought I would continue working on the painting after leaving it overnight, but have decided to rather do another. There are parts I really like (especially the rust stain on the white wall), and parts I would do differently (such as straighten the railing uprights so it doesn’t look like it’s been hit by one big wave too many). Comments from people I shared the painting with made me realise the fudged buildings in the background were an issue only for me. I had several people say they really liked the colours, whereas I’d been wondering if it was too muted (there’s no bright pop of orange or magenta). I’ll try out those thoughts and doubts in another painting at some point.

Since doing this painting, I have spent time pondering the wall from different viewpoints. I might need to acquire a couple of traffic cones before I try to pleinair paint some of these though.

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Following a ‘What If I…?’ Impulse When Painting

Often when I am painting I follow an impulse to do something and then respond to what happens. I don’t have the route for creating the painting planned out before I start, but I do know what sorts of things the materials I’m using will give me so there are some parameters, it’s not a total “anything might happen”.

I don’t try to predict what kind of “what if I…?” impulse it might be, though the materials I’m using or have close to hand do influence it. Sometimes it’s a big shift (eg generously spraying water onto wet ink), sometimes small (eg adding a little bit of purple oil pastel to make a shadow area more colourful). Some paintings it never happens, and the result isn’t better or worse for it.

The video below shows such a moment. I had two small wood panels and intended to paint pebbles on both. Instead of painting on both simultaneously as I sometimes do, I ended up with one panel still blank and the other covered in paint (acrylic ink). Seeing how much was still wet, I had an impulse to place the blank board in top of the wet paint to transfer some if the ink.

It’s something I have done before, so I’m doing it with the knowledge of previous results, which range from minimal transfer (the paint was drier than I thought) to a smudged mess (very wet paint on paper that spread and mixed because I pressed down too hard). The worst that could happen was that I’d have a chaotic colourful mess, but that could easily be washed off or overpainted. The best would be an interesting starting point for a second pebble painting.

The photo below is what I ended up with. You can see how the colours make them a pair of paintings that sit together, and how the shapes in the colours on the left suggest pebbles.

I let the left-hand panel to dry a bit whilst I used a rigger brush to define some stronger pebbles in the right-hand one.

The light reflecting in the paint shows you how wet the paint is. It’s crucial to have the panel flat at this stage to avoid the paint inadvertently running and dripping.
As the ink starts to dry, the brush strokes of the rigger brush start to hold their edges rather than melt and blend
The dried painting is a mixture of wet-into-wet colour mixing and visible brushmarks. I enjoy this mixture and how the closer you look the more you see.

This is where the two paintings ended up:

The question now is, “Which way up do I hang them?”

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Trees Don’t Have Leaves on One Side Only

Painting with a friend in the sunshine, with coffee and munchies, makes it possible to forget about the hassles of life for a bit. In our view was a magnificent old oak tree, with fresh spring leaves and branches spreading upwards and outwards in a twisty tangle.

I started with water-soluble ink in my fude pen (the fountain pen with the bent nib), then used Serpentine green watercolour, lemon yellow and iridescent green acrylic ink.

The first painting (above on the right) I got the sense of the branches peeking out through the leaves, but on the second (above left) I got carried away with my enjoyment of the ink dissolving as I added water. It ended up with very dominant branches and trunks, and a feeling of there being any leaves on the back only, none on this front. I tried using coloured pencil to change this, and some opaque paint (by mixing in white) but it didn’t help.

When I said it looked like a dead tree standing in front of other trees, my painting companion said I was being a bit too harsh. But when we swapped paintings, she chose the other one! I picked one where she’d used water-soluble graphite for the trunk and branches, which on the rough watercolour paper she used gave a strong sense of bark texture.

Our other companion was four-legged, and I couldn’t resist trying to draw her even though she’d move when I was about half way with every attempt.

Water-soluble ink pen
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Spring-Green Trees

Newly emerged leaves in spring have a bright, cheerful yellowness to them that seems to celebrate the beginning of a new growing season. I was sitting in a friend’s garden in the Scottish Borders looking at the red and yellow tulips thinking they lent themselves to a painting, but kept being pulled back to a couple of trees where the leaves were catching the sun whilst casting shadow on the stems.

I started with coloured pencil, trying to get the sense of the layers of leaves and small branches, sunny and shade sides.

I added watercolour and acrylic ink in various colours, including an iridescent green.

Mixed media on A3 watercolour paper

To stop myself fiddling with this painting while I was waiting for it to dry, I started another which I did wet-into-wet (and forgot to take progress photos).

Mixed media on A3 watercolour paper

I put the iridescent ink as a lower layer in the second painting, rather than top layer as in the first painting, so it shimmers through the other layers. The final layer was a deliberately opaque choice of cadmium yellow mixed with titanium white, so it would obscure what was beneath it.

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Concertina Sketchbook at the Yellow Breakwater

It was perfect picnic, I mean sketching, weather today. I popped into the post office with a letter, and came out with picnic supplies, then headed up to the slipway at Camus Mor and that joyous yellow lichen slice.

I had brought a small concertina sketchbook, my watercolours, ink pen and coloured pencils. I found myself thinking about how both the breakwater wall and slipway are hard-edged slashes through the pattern of the shore, and pondering how abstracted this might be if I excluded the sea which connects them and gives them context. Whether I could make the parts feel connected across the pages of the concertina sketchbook or whether it feels like a jump.

I started with watercolour, then did a layer of black water soluble ink using a fude pen (the nib of which gives a variable width of line depending on the angle at which you hold the pen). First the yellow section, then the bit to the slipway wall.

Overall my sketching was a bit wild and woolly, fragmented and distracted, a bit like how I feel, but I think there’s potential in this composition, something to explore further, to refine and grasp hold of. It’s certainly not resolved with this attempt, but I am intrigued by the challenge of making it read across the length whilst pushing the focus on shape and pattern rather than on seashore. What will be added to the blank pages is currently an unknown. The “here be dragons” part of the map.

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The Sunflower Part 2

I’ve had another round of painting that tall sunflower (see The Sunflower). This time I painted indoors using my previous drawings, memory, and photos as reference rather than being outdoors with the flower itself, because I needed a gentle day, not one squirrelling on the ground to paint.

First attempt was with the tallest piece of paper I have with me, a piece I’d previously concertina-ed. I started with Payne’s grey acrylic ink, which isn’t a surprise, but used a stick to apply it rather than the dropper, which produced a scratchy line. Then used watercolour and acrylic paint.

I had a go at reworking one of Sunday’s paintings. I don’t feel like I entirely resolved it, but like it better than it was.

I then tore a sheet of A2 watercolour paper in half, taped the edges, and got rid of the white by mixing up all the leftover paint and adding water so it became a lightish background colour. As I intended to use the same colours again in the sunflowers I was going to paint on these sheets, I knew the background colour would sit harmoniously.

I like parts of all the paintings. If I were to choose only one, I think it’d be the concertina one with its brighter colours.

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Pondering Whilst Painting: Underworked vs Overworked

How little is too little to convey the essence of a location, when have I stopped too early and where does it tip into being overworked? These are questions I found myself pondering on as I sat painting in the sunshine on the beach at Thorntonloch.

First attempt was with Payne’s grey ink.

I was tempted to add some colour to this, as it felt too uniform in tone, and I lost the white on the wave edges, but decided to let it dry, and then look at it again later. I suspect a little pale watercolour may be what it wants, and/or some coloured pencil lines, and/or white acrylic ink. I’ll decide when I look at it with fresh eyes.

Second attempt started with phthalo turquoise and Payne’s grey.

I stopped here because I liked it, but do wonder if it would benefit from a little colour in the sand in the foreground. Maybe a granulating watercolour like hematite genuine. The lack of drips and runs are because my spray water bottle stopped working, so I didn’t have to resist using it.

Third attempt I decided to use colour from the start. All was going well until I got too heavy handed with the rocks in the middle, (with tone and indenting the paper with the stick I was using to draw). I was using transparent colours and didn’t want to add white just yet

I decided to see if using more colours and making it a band of rocks would resolve it. So out came some purple (in addition to phthalo turquoise, Payne’s grey, and transparent orange).

I stopped here to let it dry, with the thought that I would have another round with some coloured pencil on the foreground and rock band. But that’s easier done on a table than sand.

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My Stormy Camus Mor Painting

I took these painting-in-progress photos whilst having a go at this month’s painting project: Stormy Camus Mor. It’s on a sheet of A1 watercolour paper, 350gsm, using acrylic inks, tube acrylics, and oil pastel. I have been thinking about this painting since I wrote up the project, it’s just taken me a while to settle down to do it.

Starting point: Payne’s grey acrylic ink. It was hot in my studio so the ink was drying quite quickly — on the right-hand side you can see some dried lines beneath the ink that I’ve spread with a wet brush. It becomes a fun juggle with speed of painting and speed of drying.
Enter some lemon yellow, using the same brush. It’s not really that big a brush if you consider how large the sheet of paper is.
Looking back through my photos, part of me wishes I’d stuck with using only the grey and yellow. Being able to see a photo of it at this point and ponder it is a good reason to take quick snaps as I paint. While I was doing it, I didn’t think about stopping at this point at all as I was already adding the other colours in my head.
Some of the paint is applied by brush, some by splattering. The latter technique means I can add colour to the surface without disturbing what’s already there, whereas applying it with a brush will mix the new and existing together. As I’m painting vertically, gravity gets involved too, pulling down fluid paint and mixing things as it happens. Spraying with some water encourages this, as you can see bottom right in the next photo.
Adding transparent orange
Adding blue to the sea, and then the sky
A bit of magenta added to the sky, to mix with the blues and create purples. Then I mixed what was on the brush with the leftovers on my palette and added this “murky dark” to the shore. Sprayed with water to encourage it to run and drip, propping the board the paper is taped to up at an angle so the drips happen at an angle. Yes, that is the tub of magenta paint that I’m using for this.
Looking at a painting from the side so it catches the light shows me where areas are still wet. Sometimes it’s really obvious, other times less so.
Sometimes it’ll only be a small area, or single drip, that’s still wet. Dabbing a finger into the paint will, of course, also tell me, but it does irreparable damage to a drip.
After everything had dried for a bit, I added some white to the sea. I’m using Schmincke’s SupaWhite acrylic ink, which is fabulously opaque.
If you’re thinking “that’s not a Schmincke dropper”, you’re be right, it’s a Daler-Rowney FW one, which I prefer as it’s got a sharper point
I’ve sprayed some of the white acrylic with water to encourage it to spread.
Need to keep an eye out for unwanted drips and effects; it’s a dance with the unpredictable, unwanted and desired, chaos and control.
Letting colours run together on the painting can create beautiful “happy accidents” with an organic feel. Painting water by literally letting the water run.
Too much can be a bad thing though! Here drips from the sky have run into the sea contradicting the direction of movement in that area. Something to be fixed before it’s dried. Responding to what’s happening is all part of the excitement of this approach to the painting.
It’s time for a two-jar propping of the board, with pthalo turquoise joining the magenta.
One thing about this approach to painting is that I can’t be too protective of any area, no matter how much I love it. If I am desperate to preserve it, then it’s time to swap to more controllable technique.
To change the direction of the drips of paint in the sea, I turned the board 90 degrees, then sprayed it with some water.
In the bottom left corner of the painting (when it’s vertical!), the drips weren’t co-operating, so I intervened with a brush to get them to go in the direction I wanted.
This is the painting vertical again, left for a bit to ensure the paint dried. When I came back to it, I decided it wasn’t where I wanted it to be yet and that I would add some oil pastel to it. Swapping mediums is a change of pace, as well as type of mark.
Detail showing how the oil pastel catches on the ‘bumpy’ texture of the watercolour paper.
I had started questioning the half sky to half land/sea composition, so only added oil pastel to the lower part of the sky, to where I thought I would crop the painting.
This is the stage the painting was at when I took it to show the in-house art critic.
At Alistair’s suggestion, I brought the rain down further, using white oil pastel. I may still work on the rain a bit more, possibly seeing if some acrylic paint will stick between the streaks of oil pastel, or maybe with some oil paint. I have cut off the top of the sheet just above the masking tape in this photo, so that composition change is decided.