January 30, 2021 – Painting My First Watercolor Painting on Paper Printed with My Own Original Pen and Ink Sketch

Thursday I laid in the image below on 9×12 140 lb watercolor paper marked to 9×6.

Friday I finished the painting in the morning and uploaded it later in the day to Fine Art America after exercise class etc 😊

And earlier today, while at Buda Mercantile (no sales on a slow day, but met a few folks who liked my work and I feel may come back, I finished most of this how-I-got-there post on creating Floating Butterfly ❤️

It itself is a partial of a larger pen and ink I’d done and had printed at my local art-friendly printer here in Austin, Southside Printing. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we were experimenting with both laser and watercolor paper, the latter of which I’d brought to try.

The first sheet’s grain didn’t like the way it was inserted, literally lol! So this came out, the right side bent and the image cropped, so Harold the owner corrected the positioning and we then got a full printout of my pen and ink on the 2nd sheet. Good thing Harold knows how to figure these things out, I sure couldn’t!

But I figured, after my previous acrylic try on laser paper, I really needed to touch back with watercolor, thus deciding painting the 1st print out, before trying the larger 2nd sheet was best, and marked out my 6×9 sizing on the sheet.

As one can tell, my pen and ink sketch, Floating Butterfly, shows up really well and I felt it finished enough to upload to Fine Art America!

And the colors work well both within and on the lines.

It’s not that much different than my first acrylic try on laser paper, but enough so – probably from practice, and the medium matching the substrates for this style – I like it much more ❤️

And though the work is a little more restrained than I usually like to do, I thought I better get my painting-bearings back first then next time, play with having colors encompass the paper canvas, and let the lines act like cursive stained glass, lol! Kinda like Klee’s pic in my tweet in another post (included here again further below). At least that’s the theory 😊

Below is the same painting dabbed and played with yesterday morning. It’s warmer with tiny white accents plus a few more gold flowers. It just feels more complete now. Enough so it felt ok to upload the image to Fine Art America —

While below is a detail shot of Floating Butterfly in high resolution —

The white dabs are white gouache via M. Graham. Because of the honey content, the paint is always just moist enough to be easily malleable, yet dense enough to be opaque when needed.

And this, below, before I forget, lol, is my original pen and ink (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen small, 0.3mm from my pack of 4 sizes). I really like the two smaller sizes, but the two larger mm pens have been handy to have!

The blue lines are from my Derwent Watercolor pencils. These marks are my exploratory lay-in. One can see I redid the ink lines somewhat differently. It really helped me get the lines where I liked, meaning where they felt good to me ❤️

I like most all my watercolor pencils, even sparingly as I use them, but the Derwents are very smooth on paper, leaving a nice line without undue pressure. Plus, very importantly – they wipe away very easily with the tiniest touch of water, or disappear beneath pigment 😊

There is so much potential in this line of art creativity for me, emotionally and creatively, I felt I really needed to get all this out. If for nothing else, to remind myself later on ☺️

Stay well everyone!

Adan

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Thanks again, everyone! 😊

Adan

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