Little Houses

Resist the colour

I was demonstrating to a small group the watercolour resist technique of combining watercolours with oil pastel. I built up coloured lines on paper with the oil pastel before adding watercolours, the watercolours resist the areas of the paper where the oil pastel is.

Later, as I was clearing away I took another look at the paper I had used in my demonstration, it seemed a shame to discard the brightly coloured picture. One of the shapes looked to me like a house, so using white acrylic paint I built up the lines of the shape and then added more small white houses to the picture.

I fitted the little white houses into the space between the curved lines, it made me think of houses spread across a hillside hugging the curves of the landscape.

I think what interests me most about this picture is that the starting point was free in movement- almost an act of automatic drawing. After this starting point a composition was planned to include the houses, and with this came a controlled placement of the houses. So the image comprises of carefully placed and painted shapes alongside loose and free mark making.

'Little Houses'

Have a great day!