Flowers – Wet on (very) Wet

After poppy that crept into my One Colour a Day book the other week I went off on a bit of a crazy exploration of wet on wet flowers over the last few days. This was very much an extensive exploration into how the paint is behaving, starting with the poppy image and how the Lamp Black diffused out into the other colours.

I’ve found this to be quite interesting. The basic idea is starting with a transparent staining organic pigment paint dropped into a very wet shape to diffuse out as it will – some like Jackson’s French Vermillion (Disazo Scarlett – PR242) or Perylene Maroon (PR179) will be very active, others such as Pyrrole Orange (PO73) are more inert, so this already creates varying effects.

Then, the magic happens when you drop in a heavier metal compound (Cobalts, Cadmiums, Nickel Titanate (PY53) or Turner’s Yellow (Zinc Tin Rutlie – PY216) which diffuses itself, pushing the stain out further. A tiny spot of Lamp Black (PBk6) completes the effect.

I played with this quite extensively in my sketchbooks…

I’ve worked on a few larger abstracts from this idea.

For this verson I used the various reds and oranges, with some Cotman Purple Lake (PV19) and Cobalt Turqoiuse (PG50). I worked on some larger, more diffuse flowers and added in some smaller ones later. I then worked in the green with Cotman Viridian (which is actually Phthalo Green PG7).

I extended this to create a more situated image with the stems and leaves in the same style (floating Perylene Green (PBk31) into the viridian leaves. The base for this was a swatch of my own Dr Round’s Tumeric (NY3) on Daler Rowney Aquafine.

I have saved my favourite until last. For this one I used various blues and pinks from the Mungyo Nostalgia of Pastels set, witn some Cotman Purple Lake and Cotman Sap Green for the leaves. I think this idea will continue to develop over some more experiments, possibly in a large scale, having picked up some full Imperial sheets of Daler Rowney The Langton the other day.