Dippy Duck #6...

Dippy Duck #6

watercolor & gouache, 8" x 8"

Chris Beck

Dippy Duck has been a favorite demo subject -- no surprise there as he is brightly colored and quite distinctive. The title reflects the construction of the set -- the top part is a pepper shaker and the bottom half is a salt dish from which you would dip the salt with a small spoon. Oddly enough, this is the one salt shaker I don't actually own. I discovered this little fellow near the close of an eBay auction and the price was stratospheric -- somewhere around $400 -- quite beyond my budget.

This is another of the pieces I finished during a demo last fall. Like the duck painting I posted last week, the background is spattered with gouache to add sparkle and texture.

Ruddy Duck Revisited...

 Quack

watercolor & gouache, 9" x 9"

Chris Beck

Back in October, I was asked to present the program for one of the local art clubs and decided to take a slightly different approach than I usually do.  Instead of working on a series showing the progression from start to finish on one image, I took several unfinished demo pieces that had accumulated in my studio and played around with them a bit.  I had hoped to share things sooner, but I left early the next morning to visit my mother and help downsize her living situation yet again. By the time I got home a week later, other tasks required my attention and this unfortunately slipped out of mind.

You may remember our old friend Ruddy Duck. Ruddy has starred in a number of demos over the past few years.  This was how he looked at the start of the demo:

I added the word "quack" up the side of the painting, using gouache with some oversize alphabet stamps that I found by chance at Rileystreet Art Supply in Santa Rosa, CA when I went to a product expo event there.

Because it looked pretty stark after I stamped the letters onto the painting, I decided to soften the image with spattered gouache.  I cut a mask for the duck out of low-tack Contact paper (you could also use frisket paper) and pressed it lightly against the image with my fingers.  Then I mixed up various colors of gouache on a spare palette tray and used a flat-bristle toothbrush to spritz it over the background and letters.

I used ultramarine blue, spectrum yellow, flame red, and burnt sienna, along with white to brighten up some of the colors. As you can see, I've customized the toothbrush I use to spatter paint. I used a heat gun to soften the handle just enough to bend it so it has a better angle for mixing paint on the palette.

I have a few other examples that I'll be sharing as soon as possible.  Right now I'm working on a large painting for an invitational watercolor biennial in Belgium this summer, so that takes precedence.

My guest column in The Artist's Magazine...

 

 Arabesque

watercolor, 9" x 10.5"

Chris Beck

Now that the January/February 2014 issue of The Artist's Magazine has reached subscribers and is in bookstores, I can share the paintings I created for my guest column on masking fluid. 

The article features expanded steps in the creation of both Arabesque and Pelican Dreams as well as several other illustrations to help you make the most of masking fluid, regardless of your choice of subject matter.  If you aren't a subscriber or don't have easy access to a shop that carries the magazine, you can order a paper or digital copy by clicking here or going to the link in the sidebar.

The addition of gouache (pronounced "gwash" -- opaque watercolor -- for more info, check out this page on the Daniel Smith website) to your watercolorist's bag of tricks opens up possibilities for surface embellishment and the use of lighter colors on top of a dark base of transparent watercolor. In Pelican Dreams, I spattered gouache on the background both to tone it down and add visual complexity. Gouache would be off-limits in certain national exhibitions that require transparency, but there is a long history of using gouache, sometimes referred to as bodycolor, to add highlights and depth to a painting.

 Pelican Dreams

watercolor and gouache, 8" x 6"

Chris Beck

Schnozz made his debut here about a month ago, and is just back for an encore visit. He's painted strictly with transparent watercolor.

Schnozz

watercolor, 6" x 6"

Chris Beck

In other news -- I'm sorry to report that I have closed my Zazzle shop.  I discovered quite by accident that they had disabled the design controls I put on my mugs and stamps and allowed buyers to apply the images to different products in the same category. That meant the images were being distorted to fit shapes they were never intended to be displayed on. After going around and around with customer service, I learned there was no option except to re-post every item and reset the controls. And since Zazzle has periodically made other changes that required me to repost some of my products, I have no guarantee that they wouldn't disable my controls again. I cannot constantly monitor something that was supposed to be a fun, no-hassle way to share my work.

Demo painting: Dippy Duck #3...

 Dippy Duck #3
watercolor, 8" x 8"
Chris Beck

This demo piece was lurking unfinished in the flat files so I decided to play with the background. I've painted this image twice before, initially with a plain cobalt violet background and then with a deep purple/magenta background of feather shapes. I had found a roller designed for painting walls that has stars scattered over the roller and thought it might work well.

As I usually do before working on the actual painting, I tested my idea on scrap paper. I put the star roller on its handle, poured some masking fluid in a tray and rolled the stars through it, making sure they were well-coated. Then I rolled it carefully across the paper so the stars wouldn't get too distorted. After the masking dried, I brushed a simple wash across it and when that dried, removed the masking with a rubber cement pickup.


Satisfied with my experiment, I cut a frisket film for the duck and rolled a star pattern across the background. After removing the frisket, I painted Winsor violet on the background around the duck, let it dry, and then removed the masking. I painted a deep rose across the entire background and followed that with several more washes to get the color depth I wanted. Unfortunately, the end result was a bit intrusive and the color was dull, so I decided to enhance it a bit with spattered gouache.


Because I would be spattering paint with a toothbrush, I didn't have to make a water-tight seal on the duck image. I cut a piece of frisket film roughly the size of the duck and laid it in place, smoothing it out before trimming it.


With a new X-acto blade in my knife, I gently cut along the outline of the duck and removed the excess film. I pressed it down firmly with my fingers, but did not burnish it down.


Using an enamel tray, I put out small dabs of gouache of a deep magenta, deep ultramarine, and permanent white. I mixed up a medium magenta and a medium blue-purple and spattered them with a flat bristle toothbrush. (Be sure to protect your work surface with newspapers!!) The size of the spatters are related to the amount of water in the paint puddle, so it takes a bit of experimenting to get the size droplets you want. Generally, the more water, the larger the droplets.


I ultimately used five or six different shades of magenta and purple, spattering until I was satisfied with the appearance of the background. (Note that, unlike watercolor which dries lighter than it appears when wet, gouache dries slightly darker.) Then I removed the frisket, pulled the masking tape off the edge of my painting, and signed it. You can see that there was a significant amount of leakage under the tape. This is not a serious problem, since I always mat my paintings, but I prefer a cleaner edge on my non-demo work. I normally use a better tape for protecting the border -- Nichiban tape -- which I discussed in this blog post a while back.



Here, once again, is the finished painting!

This week at Brush-Paper-Water...

Grand Canyon – Cache Creek, 14" x 18"
gouache over acrylic
Kay Duffy

Kay Duffy is another longtime art acquaintance whose energy and love of experimenting with new materials and techniques keeps her art lively and fresh. She is well-known for her traditional transparent watercolors of plum and cherry trees during their ethereal spring bloom (once a common feature in the local landscape and a signature of the Santa Clara Valley), but she is equally at home creating innovative collages and painting landscapes of her travels to places such as the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.

Please visit Brush-Paper-Water to see more of Kay's work.

Challenge #2...

Pablo told me I'd never guess what he'd chosen to paint for our second challenge -- foods that start with a "P" -- and he was right. Pan Dulce -- an inspired choice. I'm afraid mine really needs to be introduced last name first to fit the challenge: Pears, Asian. This is the finished version of the painting I showed you the other day with the "disappearing purple" underpainting.

"Asian Pears"
Chris Beck
watercolor & gouache, 6" x 6"


"Pan Dulce"
Pablo Villicana Lara
watercolor, 6" x 6"