Saturday, March 10, 2012

Watercolor Collage Workshop - Paper Everywhere

ASPEN GROVE
Watercolor Collage 15x22

Last Saturday I taught a Watercolor Collage Workshop where we focused on adding visual and tactile texture to painting with watercolors.
Here are some of the rice papers that we used along with tissue and cheese cloth for collage elements.
When you are using more textural elements in a painting it helps to use a limited palette - three or four main colors. I decided to use Purple, Turquoise and Indian Red
We then painted tissue paper and rice papers using the colors we had chosen for our painting.
To begin the painting, I first masked out some trees and then wet the top area of the paper and painted in a loose bacground. I spattered and used salt to create visual texture. I then wet the foreground and repeated the same colors using plastic wrap for texture. You can also see a couple of large shapes of tissue paper that I had collaged on before I  remembered I needed to take a photo.

We continued to add collage to the painting, then defined more areas with paint and then collaged some more. It is a very creative and iterative process - and somewhat messy as you can see from the photo above - paint and papers everywhere but the results were worth it!