“Flower Children”, as the above creatures on Yupo Paper are called, just happened by accident—but gave birth to a new-to-me process which excites me more than I can say! For starters, the original is larger than my scanner/printer bed so that you are not by any means looking at the whole painting.
The elephant (I think that’s what they are) on the right has a much longer stretch of trunk, and the bottom of the piece is loaded with flowers. On the left, the original painting contains a generous vertical column of flowers—thus adding balance and extra interest. The flowers are mostly rose-hued and magenta, with splashes of white.
The blotchy quality is obviously due to Kosher salt. But not obvious on the print is the raised texture, achieved with gouache over the initial watercolor washes. I have used gouache before, but never to the extent of mounding it up so heavily—like oil paint. This works on Yupo, but is not so effective on normal rag watercolor paper which will soak up some of the layers. On Yupo (a glass-like synthetic surface), the paint cannot go anywhere but up. The rugged textural effect of the original is visible through glass in a picture frame, but not on the reproduction.
So given those details, hopefully you can begin to imagine these funky flower children. Gouache on Yupo has a brilliance, similar to acrylic, yet it can be thinned to transparency. (I guess acrylic can also, but I’ve yet to try that. So far I have not fallen in love with acrylic, like I have with gouache and watercolor.)
The above painting and the two below, which I did in the same week, are framed and hanging in our living room/dining area—hanging, yet nearly bouncing off the wall thanks to their vibrant color. The combination of Yupo, watercolor, salt, and a build-up of gouache is something that I think I can reproduce while spinning off in many directions with an endless variety of subject matter. No two renderings will ever be alike, because paint on Yupo does its own thing.
Meanwhile, here are the paintings which follow the “Flower Children”:
“Castlewood Canyon, Colorado”. Also too large for my scanner. There is more rock across the lower right on the original, and more vegetation on the left. But the over-all effect has been reproduced.
“End of the Day Glass” (series) I’ve posted at least one other in this series. Victorian glassware is a delight to me. Glassblowers sometimes combined their leftovers at the end of the day and created one-of-a-kind whimsies that could not be reproduced—rather like paintings on Yupo paper.
Like the others, this one was a lot of fun. The original, also large, contains more on the bottom and left. The bubbly, blobby circles in the upper center formed themselves, and I was careful not to disturb them while dropping in a suggestion of blue and rose. Then I fabricated the lower, slightly off center blob with my brush to extend the idea of the roundness of the vases (or whatever they are). Again, Kosher salt created speckles, and here I squirted a bit of water from my small spray bottle, while tipping the Yupo to disperse the water and salt.
These are all tricks and techniques that a child could learn if he or she so desired. And each finished work is always different from the last. It’s a wonderful feeling to make something that is “uniquely YOU!” or “uniquely ME!”
Margaret L. Been, June 2014
The Messy Palette . . . 