I enjoyed making my floral alphabet watercolor series so much that I decided to make another set of 5"x7" alphabet watercolors - this time with a painted background (instead of painted letters), leaving the letters as blank negative space like I often do for my custom name paintings (like this recent one for Henry).
I wanted to do a rainbow background, starting with red on the top, bleeding into yellow (it's hard to get a good orange color straight from a tube, so I planned to let the red and yellow mix on the page to achieve a blended orange in between them), then light green, dark green, blue, and violet on the bottom.
To prepare for these 26 small paintings, I first grabbed 13 pieces of 9"x12" watercolor paper, and measured each into two 5"x7" rectangles, with a small margin around them (to help tape the paper down on the table while I painted). I cut out these rectangles and saved the little bit of extra paper for future use (scraps can come in handy when you're trying out a new watercolor tube and want to see what color it looks like).
Next, I selected what font I wanted to use for my letters. I wanted something with a serif, so that simple letters like the capital "I" wouldn't just be a line, but have at least a bit of visual interest. On the other hand, I also didn't want anything too thin, with really delicate serifs, because I knew I'd be painting these fast. I would put a lot of water down around the letters to get the wet-on-wet effect I was hoping for, and then use six highly saturated pigments (red, yellow, light green, dark green, blue, and violet) directly on that water before the water started to dry too much.
I ultimately chose to use Charter Bold for my font. Looking at the widest letter (usually a capital "M" or "W"), I decided what size to print the letters at so that there would still be enough space around the wide letters for it to comfortably fit on a 5"x7" size piece of paper - which in this case was size 280. Then I printed out all 26 capital letters, each centered in a 5"x7" square.
I traced these letters onto my watercolor paper by holding both pieces of paper up to the window on a sunny day, and lightly using pencil on my watercolor paper to outline the letters. Then, I taped down the first several paintings-to-be to get started on the fun part! Below you can see the first two letters, lightly traced and taped down, ready to be painted.
My next blog post will show the in-progress painting for the first 8 letters - A through H! Check back soon.
I wanted to do a rainbow background, starting with red on the top, bleeding into yellow (it's hard to get a good orange color straight from a tube, so I planned to let the red and yellow mix on the page to achieve a blended orange in between them), then light green, dark green, blue, and violet on the bottom.
To prepare for these 26 small paintings, I first grabbed 13 pieces of 9"x12" watercolor paper, and measured each into two 5"x7" rectangles, with a small margin around them (to help tape the paper down on the table while I painted). I cut out these rectangles and saved the little bit of extra paper for future use (scraps can come in handy when you're trying out a new watercolor tube and want to see what color it looks like).
Next, I selected what font I wanted to use for my letters. I wanted something with a serif, so that simple letters like the capital "I" wouldn't just be a line, but have at least a bit of visual interest. On the other hand, I also didn't want anything too thin, with really delicate serifs, because I knew I'd be painting these fast. I would put a lot of water down around the letters to get the wet-on-wet effect I was hoping for, and then use six highly saturated pigments (red, yellow, light green, dark green, blue, and violet) directly on that water before the water started to dry too much.
I ultimately chose to use Charter Bold for my font. Looking at the widest letter (usually a capital "M" or "W"), I decided what size to print the letters at so that there would still be enough space around the wide letters for it to comfortably fit on a 5"x7" size piece of paper - which in this case was size 280. Then I printed out all 26 capital letters, each centered in a 5"x7" square.
I traced these letters onto my watercolor paper by holding both pieces of paper up to the window on a sunny day, and lightly using pencil on my watercolor paper to outline the letters. Then, I taped down the first several paintings-to-be to get started on the fun part! Below you can see the first two letters, lightly traced and taped down, ready to be painted.
My next blog post will show the in-progress painting for the first 8 letters - A through H! Check back soon.
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