Christmas Cards: Doves in negative painting

 

One painting technique I find useful is negative painting. So today I showed making a card with that process. Below are a few others I've done. The mistletoe I found on Skillshare. 

Just doing words. I started with the bottom word, painted around it; did each consecutive word, one by one, painting around everything each time, getting darker and darker with each layer.  The Stems and pink looking JOY are painted with pearlescent watercolor paints OVER the black. 

Final dove painting

Another dove 

Find a simple pattern you like and can repeat in the painting. 

First make a light wash background. You can texture it with salt or saran wrap.

Dry that. Then sketch your first object, in this case, as dove. I just cut around the sketch, taped it in place, and used Saral (graphite transfer paper) to transfer the sketch to the card. 

After drawing the dove, I painting around it with a darker blue. This makes the dove appear.

The trick is to keep the area wet so that you don't get any hard edges. For example, I will wet about 2 inches out from the object, then paint closer to it and allow the paint to disperse into that wet area, keeping the edges soft, except around the dove itself.

Dry completely, then sketch in two other doves that will appear farther away. They will be darker because they are drawn over the paint from painting around the first dove. Then paint darker around those two new ones to make them appear.

You can keep doing this process until you have as many and as dark as you want.

I painted in the olive branch last. 

I have one suggestion if this is the first time you have tried negative painting. Try to stick to just a few colors, getting darker with each progressive layer. For example, go from magenta to blue to purple; or yellow to orange to red to brown; or yellow to green to blue. 

Most paintings are NOT done completely in negative painting. Google negative painting, and you'll see some pretty interesting paintings.

I have several other posts on negative painting also. See Sep 8, 5, and 2 of 2020; Nov 1, 2018.