Carol Keene: PlayTime

Monday, January 19

PlayTime

"PlayTime"
7" x 8.5"
Watercolor on Yupo

I'm returning to my roots — my artistic roots. I taught myself to paint watercolors while I was in college to become a chemist. When THAT didn't work out, I became a wife and mother and continued to dabble in watercolor. My dabbles looked like the image at the bottom of today's post, back in the day. And now I'm playing with new products and they make me paint like… this!

I spent some time this afternoon puddling, stamping, stenciling and playing with traditional transparent watercolors, a brush and a Winsor and Newton watercolor sticks. They look like the hard pastels I use, but these are pure pigment watercolors. They can be drawn on dry paper or wet, squiggled into a puddle on a palette and made into a brush-able mixture. The pure pigments of the sticks impressed me. The yupo paper (actually plastic) is a lot like painting on a gessoed surface. The paint stays and dries on the impenetrable surface. If it isn't to your liking, just wipe it with a tissue, Q-Tip or put the entire thing under the faucet and bid it adieu.