The Joy Of Six

I'm normally pretty good at restricting the number of colours in my paintings but sometimes I just need to let go and throw everything down.  This painting has 22 different colours in it.  There are 21 of the colours in the Winsor & Newton professional half pan set ( all except aureolin, the black and the white) plus transparent green, which I've poured into that palette in place of aureolin.

I got the idea for this from The Mind Of Watercolour on YouTube.  In this video https://youtu.be/30qyclTocfo, he does a set of "minimal studies" that look great.  I thought I'd have a go at doing something similar but decided to go a bit further by putting them within a multi coloured frame.

So the plan was to:

- measure up a grid on the paper

- negatively paint the grid lines using masking tape, so leave the lines clear and use tape to mask aro7nd the inside of the six individual white rectangles

- spattering on some masking fluid

- paint the frames with lots of different colours, letting each colour take up maybe an inch before switching to the next and allowing adjacent colours to mix

- chucking on some salt at the right moment as the paint was drying

- removing all the tape and masking fluid (so the white bits reserved by the masking fluid spatters only show up in the frames) and not in the sub paintings

- painting six minimal studies like those in the YouTube video

I did make some mistakes though

- I messed up the measurements, so the six subpaintings aren't all the same size - annoying but not a disaster

- some paint crept under the tape in places and there's one spot (top right of the bottom right painting) where a rogue bit of tape masked part of the border.  Again this wasn't a disaster - I think these imperfections add something

- I went a bit OTT on those subpaintings.  Not just on the thickness of the paint and on giving in to temptation by adding a second wash in places but, most frustratingly, by not leaving enough white.

But actually this came out OK.  If someone hasn’t seen that YouTube video and what I was aiming for, they might like this.  They’d probably be impressed that I'd left more white space then normal.  They'd like how the six subpaintings seem to stick out from the painting ahead of the frames, which look like the wall behind six paintings.  They'd like the white spots and salt effects within the background.  And they'd really like some of the bright colours in there and the colour schemes and jarring contrasts in the subpaintings.

This one was a lot of fun after all the Hartlip paintings and figure drawings where I've had to hold myself back and keep everything under control.  It's given me some ideas for full size abstract landscapes that I could whip out really quickly.  Maybe I'll have a go at a fast painting tomorrow.

This one was sold to a collector in North West London.