Watercolor Failure!

It turns out that I really like the look of spatter paint as a background in watercolor.  I have enjoyed making little panels then turning them into a card with something on top of the spatter.  It occurred to me that if I got a small sieve I could make better spatters.  Wrong!!  At least the first effort turned out to be a bust.

This little sieve I found at Dollar Tree.  The brush is a 3/4-inch oval wash Majesty by Royal and Langnickel.  The paper is Artist's Loft watercolor.

This is what I did--so others will know what not to do.

First I wet the brush in good shape then put lots of water into the red paint cake in the palette.  I picked up a good bit of water and brushed it across the sieve. INSTANT BLOBS of red.   Since that was not what I was going for but thought I could perhaps use them as flowers I let them be then tried tapping the handle of the brush against the metal ring on the sieve.  That DID give me the desired spatters.  Worked great.

So I tried with the blue.  I meant to just do the splatter but I had too much watery paint on the brush and it just dropped right through the sieve onto the paper.  More blobs, blue this time.  Still, I did a little spatter.

OK, I wanted to try the yellow since I am all about the primaries.  I washed the brush again, dropped water into the yellow cake then picked it up. ONCE AGAIN instant blobs, but they came out green since they mostly fell on the blue blobs.  R-r-r-r!  Not what I was looking for.  I did the tapping again and did get more spatter but this was also almost green.  Must be the brush was not completely cleaned from the blue.  Oh well.

Now I had seven large blobs of paint.  I thought perhaps if I took a wadded up paper towel I could pick up some of the blob.  Well, yes, I could, BUT rather than improving things,  the central red, blue, and yellow blobs flowed together instead of up into the towel.  Not really that pleasing a look...unless you like granulating colors.  Well, on second look now that the paint is much more dry, it is a little more interesting.  I will probably use it.

There is much to learn, isn't there?!  In every field of endeavor.