Losing control of my paint, and loving it!

There are two broad techniques I use to paint flowers: wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. The former is my absolute favourite, it involves soaking the paper back, front, and on its back once more until it is absolutely dripping. Then, it involves dropping, splashing, pouring paint on the soaked paper and hoping it vaguely sticks to the pencil outlines I've done to demarcate where I think the flowers might go. I then have to wait for the paper to dry a bit, and try to add some darker shades. Once I've taken the "shapes" of the flowers as far as they can go I have to wait at least an hour or so for the paper to dry off to add highlights, details, touch ups and so on. If the paper is even a little bit wet when these next few layers happen, the "edges" of the flowers that define them will not hold. They will blur off into other shapes.

 The reason I enjoy wet-on-wet so much is because it is so much easier to get a fresh and spontaneous look from it. Wet-on-dry is using watercolour paints on dry paper. I've done wet-on-dry flowers once (the video below) and it came out okay, but I found I had to work much much harder to make it look lively. It all ended up looking a bit flat anyway. Whereas when I work with wet paper, the paper does half the work for me. I don't have to think about what the painting will look like - I actually have no idea! And that's the best fun I have with my art every week. 

I could honestly write ten blog posts in one night about the different aspects of painting flowers. I leave this one with a few final thoughts:

• I cannot stress the importance of good quality watercolour paper. Nothing less than 300gsm (which is what I use here), but I would urge you to use higher grade paper than that to really have some fun. Bad quality paper will crumple, crinkle, curl, not absorb the water or the paint, and will leave you feeling angry.
• The balance of keeping watercolours light and transparent and the temptation to go over the same bit again and again is one I always struggle with - hence the really dark darks in my paintings. They are almost 100% because I tried to paint something else there which turned out badly. Nothing a wash of indigo paint cant fix apparently.
• Textures are fun - I used to try keeping my paint to water ratio on my brushes consistent, but there is something to be said about using more paint at parts to give a more "gouache" effect.

Until my next painting this weekend!

-SANJUKTA