I painted the whole background a very dark brown. I chose brown so that any spots would look slightly stressed and add richness to the gold, otherwise it might have looked flat and opulent. When it was dry I painted a layer of Roberson's gold size. This size is brilliant for large flat areas of transfer gilding. Transfer gold can be bought as hard-pressed and it's impossible to get it off the backing paper (although maybe it works for varnishes in frame gilding). Mine is 23.5carat gold; … [Read more...]
Watercolour Gladiolus 3: re-working the background
I'v experimented quite a bit with the gladiolus. It was too monochromatic so I tried a coloured ground, even though I had thought of gilding the background. That meant it was quite okay to underpaint it first. View the blog on 2 November! In the end I kept some of the coloured ground on the card version. The paper was badly stretched on the one corner and I like my work to be super-flat when complete, so the first thing to do was to re-stretch it. It had cockled at the time but I had to get on … [Read more...]