Red Drip

IMG_6346a
Originally uploaded by philsajonesen

This painting was made in the first half of 2008. It's pretty big, 20x30ish. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I only spent one evening working on it. I gave it to my brother as a thank you present for being my best man when i got married this summer.

It's watercolour on drawing paper, so it buckled and waved quite a bit as different areas got wet. That created a bit of an issue when i was trying to frame it, which turned out to be more frustrating than painting it.

The painting process began with flicking red paint on the flat paper. My original intention was to make it a Jackson Pollack-ish style drip painting. I haven't developed a great way to do that with a watercolor brush yet so i wasn't getting enough coverage to create much of a painting.

My next step was to make big really wet blotches and then to tilt the paper so the wet spot would run. I did several blotches in all four directions and ended up with a bit of a multi-paned window pattern.

Then i tried to fill in all the white areas but excluding the area immeadiately around my splatter dots. So in effect the dots would have little white halos. I filled some areas with warmer red and some with a cooler red. I added a bit of blue to some wet red areas to create even cooler areas, but they turned out pretty much blue.

I used a tiny brush so it took at least a couple hours to paint this. But that's about it and how it was created.

When i take pictures of these paintings i need to include a grey card so a colour balance can be done. I wish i had documented the process of the painting, but that's the idea for future paintings.