Paradise in a paper bag

Oil pastel on A3 mixed media paper (cropped)

My son picked these apples (variety: Paradise Citta) from our little tree. It's still laden down with fruit.

Christmas Day Watercolours

A pause in preparing Christmas dinner

If you get some new watercolours for Christmas, it's only right, proper and polite to try them out. This was a dinky little set of lovely Sennelier colours - the "Aqua-mini" -  that came as part of a gift subscription to The Artist magazine.

 

Left to right: Reindeer figurine n the windowsil; Glass of prosecco; Cork

Masking Fluid

A small study of a pretty, sunlit wave at Praa Sands
From a photoraphic reference
Watercolour (with masking fluid)

Watercolour is a transparent medium and has a very delicate effect, which is both attractive and frustrating. I have an ambivalent relationship with the medium - I want to be able to use it well, but I am very wary of tweeness.

There is probably several posts worth of thinking to come up with related to that, though.

In the meantime, meet masking fluid:

This particular bottle contains blue masking fluid. It's a rubber-based liquid that dries in contact with the air (one of the reasons that I have a dedicated, synthetic brush for it, too, although silicon colour shapers can also be used, apparently). It's used to mask bits of paper from a watercolour wash.

You can, of course, just leave the area untouched - but that isn't always easy to do if your watercolour is wet and washy, or even if you just forget in the splashiness of the moment. Masked areas have hard edges, which may or may not be required (they can be softened with water), but which can be hard to achieve without masking.

Anyway, this is my first ever bottle of masking fluid. So far, it's proving to be really rather effective. Good for foam on waves and highlights on bottles...