a watercolour by any other name
Why do you call it a Watercolour when it’s a Acrylic thinned with water on a primed panel ? Transparent Watercolour is in a class by itself and is not an emulsion like Acrylic
Ron Murdoch thanks Ron, never called it a transparent watercolour. it is all watercolour. i add gel medium to the watercolours if i need to work the idea further which makes them acrylics, and of course i do have a few acrylics on hand that i reach for as well. for a while i called them mixed media works, now i don’ treally call them anything; mentioning they are watercolour / acrylic simply to let anyone looking at it what paints were used while painting it. there has never been any attempt to claim anything other than that nor any attempt to misrepresent the process. in the painting above i flooded the bottom half of the panel with a mix of cobalt and t white. once it dried i reflooded it with a gouache horizon blue with some t white,; lastly on poured a manganese blue watercolour wash over it and let it float until it dried. had it not been quite where i wanted it i would have continued on working more blues in. i didn’t know i was going to go thru all that when i started, it was a matter of how the blues dried, which helped shape where i went next. the whites in the mid ground were gesso / were ghosted over with t white to get them the intensity i wanted. so there is a certain amount of working over which you would not necessary get / have with transparent watercolors which is why it never occurred to me to speak of the as such. the work gets closer to being finished with a coat of spray fixative to secure everything; once dry 2 coast of either golden or liquitex varnish.
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