Laguna - Poured Painting

I haven't done a poured watercolor painting for a long time so I decided to do one this week.  Poured paintings have a very graphic quality, which I really like.  Each time a layer of paint is poured and dries, another layer of resist is added to areas that don't need to be any darker to save those values from future pours.

This is a large painting, 22" x 30", and doing each pour was a bit messy.  I ended up with a lot of the paint on my shoes.  I haven't quite learned how to keep the paint on the paper while I'm blending the colors together.  I think I might be using too much paint.

I didn't stretch the paper because I have been told that the paper can be manipulated better if it's not stretched and can be bent to make the paint go where you want.  This paper, Arches #150, dried with big vertical ripples in it which made subsequent pours very difficult.  I think I'll try the next poured painting on stretched paper and see how that works or maybe I'll use a thicker paper.

By the time a poured painting is done, it is almost completely covered with resist so it's hard to know what it is going to look like when the resist is removed.  Taking the resist off is like opening a package.  You don't know what you're going to find.  It's really fun!

Laguna
Image size 22" x 30"
Watercolor