Another Trick

Some watercolor artists seem to spatter with aplomb--their paintings have wonderful speckles and dots seemingly sprayed at random across them and yet falling in all the right places. The first time I tried to spatter (by flicking towards my painting with a loaded brush), it came out more like arterial spray, and I hastily backed off of that plan for ruining my art. But I learned a trick from Cindy and Theresa while on my vacation painting trip, and I'm going to share it with you.


This is a photo of one of Cindy's luminous demo paintings she did for us, during our wine tasting day in the Santa Ynez Valley. See up in the left-hand corner that little bit of red grid sticking out from behind the picture? It's a piece of plastic needlepoint canvas. You paint the colors on it that you wish to spatter, and then you hold it above your painting and blow through it, and all the paint goes beautifully in a nice even spatter. You can do multiple colors at once, or layer them by doing first one, then adding another, until you have enough spatter. You can use different sizes of canvas (they come very fine to quite large) to achieve different sizes of spatter. Genius! When you are finished, just dunk the piece of canvas into your water to clean it, then wipe it down and put it back in your pack for re-use.