blob painting | outside the bubble

Last night I watched a vid by a new (to me) artist, creationsceecee. It was titled “blobs to florals” so of course I had to check it out.

It was a large-scale project. The artist worked at it on-and-off for a week. For a painting that started as loose blobs of color splashed around the page, it became surprisingly precise, with penciled lineart and color placed painstakingly within the lines. Not a drop out of place. Despite the precision, it very much retained its identity as a watercolor piece, which was cool. I’ve seen watercolor pieces that are so controlled that I’m like, “This is technically impressive, but what I enjoy about watercolor has been lost. It might as well just be a photo or digital art.” Here, though, she used a lot of wet-on-wet for shading, and I think granulating paints for texture. In the background, she placed three stalks of basically giant blueberries. She initially painted them very dark, then decided they were too dark and largely lifted them out, but kept the darkest edge intact for a lot of pop. She also made one of the blueberry stalks recede into the background by painting over it with a semi-opaque mix for a bit of an ethereal look. Could this be a use case for white watercolor?? It’s way too weak to actually serve as white, but maybe it can be used for atmospheric washes??

Lately I’ve been thinking I need to get outside the LMA bubble. I still enjoy all their stuff, fun vibe and consistent high quality, super chill to pop on a video in the evening while walking at my desk. But venturing afield will probably serve me better in terms of artist food (different subject matter, approaches, techniques).

I started a new watercolor sketchbook yesterday. Sarah has a whole video on “conquering the first page.” For me, the “first page” is not intimidating because I use cheap-ass spiral-bound Canson books, and they’re just 20 pages so I’m often starting a new one anyhow. (This is my fifth one.) But I watched the video anyway out of curiosity. Sarah’s solution is to randomly flip to, like, page 7 and start there. Boom, not the first page!! This is so funny to me (in a good way) and I’m glad it works for her, but I would never. It would bother me not to have my pics in chronological order.

(It probably works better in Sarah’s case because she likes doing themed spreads—the two facing pages must match each other in some way. I thought that seemed too restrictive, but maybe not if you allow yourself to hop around.)

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edit (4/6): NOPE on the white watercolor thing. I did a quick test piece with three flower stalks. Over the right stalk, I did a wash of white watercolor + a bit of lemon yellow. Over the left stalk, I did a wash of plain water. They turned out pretty much the same. Might as well just use water. Guess my white pan is going BACK TO WATERCOLOR JAIL. Why do they even bother including this in the starter kit??