VIDEO: Painting Transparently on Wood
Hello Moonbeams,
I have been getting a lot of requests to do demos about using watercolour on other surfaces and working with watercolour grounds. I recently have been doing a lot of painting on wood for my current gallery show as well as my book Mountaincholia, and I wanted to give you a rundown of how I am going about that! Expect more watercolour ground techniques in the near future because I will be filming them as I work on different surfaces. Next up, will probably be one working with the more opaque grounds using the mixture I prefer for the majority of my work.
If you want to know exactly how I prepared the wood for this demo (using a different sketch but the same preparation technique) You can see that in this video
Prepping Wood with Transparent Watercolor Ground
Annnd if you want a little extra timelapse of the piece I prepared in my prepping video, here is that for you as well!
Further notes about painting on wood
I have since experimented with two other wood varieties and overall it seems that my results have been similar. The main thing I recommend is that you do sand down the wood until it is almost totally smooth. I have painted both on highly polished pieces of wood, as well as very unfinished pieces. The less polished it is, the more absorbent it will be but if you put a clear coat of watercolour ground over it, it usually ends up being similar in my experience thus far, only it will not look as nice if you are working with super raw, splintery wood. I also tried doing one piece of wood with a totally smooth coat of ground, as opposed to doing the texturing, and my results were still similar other than a slight difference in how watercolour dries on the surface with more or less texture.
Above is the piece in which I put one thin, totally smooth coat of transparent ground. It is barely absorbent but enough to do some minor layering. The biggest tip I have is to use highly saturated pigments from the beginning rather than trying to layer to build saturation up. I also notice that white gouache highlights are far, far brighter on this surface than when I use them in my usual work with the more opaque grounds.
If you are painting on a darker piece of wood, make sure your painting has enough contrast to still stand out. You could also put a thin coat of opaque white watercolor ground of the top of your drawing in order to give yourself a lighter surface to work from, and increase the contrast between the background wood and the painting. Doing this will of course eliminate some of the wood texture though. I plan to experiment with this idea soon and work both with transparent and opaque areas for some different contrast :)
Sidenote: The long greenish blue lines running through this polished root ball slice (above) are actually crushed stones and glow powder (so yes, they glow!) My father was the one who found this dried root ball in the desert, brought it home and polished and prepared it for me with the stones.
Finally, I also tried doing some of the birch pieces, such as the one above, with the background entirely covered in transparent ground, rather than just the drawing and it gave me a bit more freedom to paint outside the lines and add some interesting details that could still be lifted and manipulated without them soaking into the wood. I do feel that the ground does slightly distort the beauty of the natural wood, however, it is subtle and can totally be worked with. I will continue this adventure and see what else I can do with it and let you know if I make any crazy new discoveries! <3
Materials:
Brushes:
Royal & Langnickel Zen 10/0
3/0 Princeton select round brush (highly used and fuzzy)
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Surface:
Birch wood slice sanded to a soft, but not totally polished finish using a Ryobi 1/4 sheet finish sander kit and prepared with Transparent watercolor ground by Daniel Smith
Paints:
Daniel Smith Prussian Blue
Daniel Smith Carbazole Violet
Daniel Smith Burgundy Yellow Ochre
Van Gogh Azo Yellow Light
L’aquerelle Viridian Green
Daniel Smith Carmine
Winsor and Newton Crimson
Other Mediums:
Staedtler 925 05 mechanical pencil.
Carnelian crystals
Peridot crystals
Pearl Ex metallic Aztec Gold dry pigment
