Painting Daisies Using Masking Fluid and Salt

1. Introduction : Hi, and thanks for joining me. This class is about the sheer enjoyment of putting paint to paper. The class will give you a gentle introduction into how to use masking fluid and salt in your paintings. Lost enjoying the freedom of the painting process. Ok, can be so beneficial to our health and well-being and allocating part of our day to paint is so good for us. I want to give you the space to explore and experiment using masking fluid and salt. The great thing about masking fluid is that when we apply it, it protects the white paper underneath and this allows us to paint freely. We don't have to worry about painting up to the edges and around objects. We can just go straight over the top with one big brush mark and let the paint and water do the work. I hope you will enjoy this process as much as I do, and enjoy the freedom and unpredictability of the paint. You'll follow me to produce a painting which may or may not look something like this. And I say that because I want you to just enjoy putting paint to paper. You can follow the class step-by-step if you wish or if you prefer, please feel free to branch out and experiment a bit. This is your time and your practice. So perhaps you're not a fan of daisies and would rather pick your own meadow flower. Or perhaps you'd like to change the color palette or do something completely different with the composition. What I want you to take away from this class is that the act of painting can and should be relaxing. And we'll learn how to use masking fluid and salt. Along the way. We'll start off by collecting information about the natural world in your sketch books with simple line drawings. Then joined with masking fluid will transfer your sketches to the watercolor paper. And we'll paint the scene using salt to add the texture. So let's get painting. 2. Lesson 1 Sketch: Before we dive straight into the painting, I want to invite you to collect some resources. And by this, I mean sketchbook drawings or photos of the types of meadow flowers that you want to paint. Of course, do feel free to use the oxide Daisy reference photos that I've included in the resources. You could just look for your own subject matter. You can use your own photos or photos from the Internet as long as they're not copyrighted. Or alternatively, you could go outside sketching, take a picnic, make a debit. Trying to find shapes, forms, and colors to inspire you. Look for subjects that make you curious, subjects that make you really want to draw them. I just want to acknowledge that sketching in public for the first time could be a little scary. It takes a fair bit of confidence to rock up somewhere with your sketchbook and just start drawing. You might even find that people stop and look at what you're doing. But don't let that put you off and try and enjoy those connections with other people. So if this is your first time, then it's a really good idea to try and choose a quiet spot. It can help to keep the nerves down. And that will allow you to relax and draw more freely. If this really seems too much of a challenge right now, then that is fine. Don't worry. You could just take a reference photo instead and draw from those at home. Or if you have one, you could draw in the privacy of your own garden. I think it's important to change how we think about sketchbooks. Sketch books are really not meant to be perfect by any means. More so they are a reference, a journal, even a way to process what we've seen. For this exercise. You're just creating a quick sketch just for reference, not a finished piece of work. So you won't have to be at sketching for a long time. When you're making your sketches, concentrate on the line work rather than the shading. Just try and get down the basic shapes using pencil or pen. At this stage is just a note-taking exercise to remind us of the forms and shapes that interested us. We are not making a masterpiece that comes later. 3. Lesson 2 Transfer your sketches onto watercolour paper: I've transferred a few daisies. I'm onto this paper. I hope you can just about see them because I'm using a very light pencil line. Because I don't really want a pencil to show through. Once I've removed the masking fluid. I'm hoping it's just dark enough so that you can see it. So remember, use your sketches to draw from. When you're drawing these daisies. Don't just make up a daisy because it's much better to always draw from life. Because sometimes the petals they sit together, they're not always evenly spaced out. Sometimes. There's two together. Obviously, you've got some foreshortening here because this is in France, so you don't see the full length of this. Sometimes the petals come up where you think may just be straight. Nature doesn't, doesn't grow. And perhaps sometimes as our brains expect it to. And if you draw from life, it will always end up looking more natural. So keep doing that. Until you've got all your daisies in and some of your stems too. Don't worry too much about standard. You don't have to get them all in. Just do one more. This one has a gap and its petals. The top. And then a group of about four which are all connected. Then another gap. Anyway, you must look at your drawings and have, it's just really important to keep looking at your reference photo. Because if we just draw what our brains thing could Daisy looks like, we'll end up with all the same daisies. And of course nature. It's just not like that. Rely on what you're seeing in front of your eyes. And you will end up there much more naturalistic looking Daisy. 4. Lesson 3 All about masking fluid: So why use masking fluid is a tool? One of the most difficult things to master in watercolors is planning how to apply the paint in watercolor. So you plan the lightest area of your paintings first, and then keep those areas protected throughout the painting process. Watercolors are different from other mediums because they are translucent. Therefore, paintings needs to be built up from the lightest to the darkest values. This is different from say, oils, acrylics and gouache. These paints are opaque and some allow you to cover up any mistakes with another layer of paint. This is just not possible with watercolor. So planning is the key, and that's where masking fluid comes in. So here we have two types of masking fluid. I think this one, this type of masking fluid is probably what most people are familiar with. It comes in a bottle and can come in white or blue, or actually yellow as well. I have a few types which I can recommend. This is a masking fluid by shrink. This one is white in color. It works really well. But some people prefer not to use white because it's a little hard to see when it dries. You might prefer to use colored one. This is an own brand, one from Jackson's art supplies. This is my favorite. It always comes off the paper really cleanly and the fluid itself is thin enough to allow you to draw a thin line with it. So this brand is mulatto and it's an art masking liquid that comes in a pen form. This is a two millimeter fine pen. I think you can get them in different sizes. Um, what happens is when you first buy them, this nib will be white and you need to just press that down a few times to get the masking fluid flowing and then you can just draw with it like you would have helped him. I find this quite convenient. You can only really do get one sort of line from it. So I think generally I rather use a brush, but this does definitely have its place. And it's very quick and easy to use a mess free, which is nice. Now let's look at what we can use to apply the bottled fluid. Here are three different tools that you can use. A brush, a ruling pen, a clay shaper tool with a silicon point. Now brushes can get easily ruined by masking fluid because when the masking fluid dries, it becomes tacky and very difficult to remove. I reserve a couple of brushes for applying masking fluid. You see I've put some gold tape on the ends of them's just so that I know these ones are just for masking fluid. But however, I still need to keep these bristles are clean and masking fluid free. And the way that I do that is I know some people use soap. They wiped their brushes in bar soap beforehand. Um, but I tend to use an old lip self and old lip self that I've had. And I've simply, before I start to use the brush and paint with it, I just simply wipe it over the top of the lip self. Obviously, I don't use this on my lips anymore. Um, and I coat the brush in a fine layer of Philip South before starting to paint. And what that does is it creates a waterproof outer layer to the brush. Then we have a clay shaper tool, which is a tool used by sculptors for moving clay around. It has a silicon rubber tip, which the masking fluid just won't stick to. And when he finished, it can easily be removed with a cloth even once it's dry. And you can buy these packs cheaply, packs of these clay shapers. On Amazon. I've got few examples here, so here's the rest of that pack. They come in with different tips. So this one is like a point. This one is a chisel. And of course they all apply the Masking fluid in different ways. They've got slightly different shapes to them. So you can get variations on how the masking fluid flows on the paper. Then I've got some very small ones here. I'm saying things, points, chisels just allow finer line. And then these ones also quite helpfully have a metadata at the ends. So you can use that to dip in the masking fluid to get some little dots of texture and things like that. So I'd advise getting a pack of these. I think they're probably about five to seven pounds each. You can find these on Amazon. So here we have a ruling pen, which is traditionally used to apply ink in straight lines. What happens is the ink or the fluid that you're using is taken up into the pen, into the gaps between these two metal prongs and comes out in a line. You can alter the thinness or thickness of that line by turning the screw to either open or shut. The distance between the two prongs. And what this is really good for is if you wanted to do sort of blades of grass, very fine lines. And this makes it very easy. And you can see when you lift off the paper, you get a little point. So I do like this, but it's difficult to turn on the paper I find. So normally I'd just use it for grass, things like that. So you can see when you start to apply the water, the masking fluid protects the area of the paper so that the pink can't touch it. Then you're really free to drop on paint as you wish, without the marks of the masking tape or masking fluids. Sorry. I'm attracting any of the pigment. So there we have it. The three things that I mainly use to apply my masking fluid, I would recommend a monetary masking fluid pen. I would recommend, um, this shrink white masking fluid in a bottle. But this is my absolute favorite, the blue one, masking fluid from Jackson's art supplies. 5. Lesson 4 Apply the masking fluid: We're going to apply the masking fluid over the petals of the daisies and the stems and the leaves. Because daisies are naturally white, it can be difficult to paint in the background around them without accidentally painting over them. The masking fluid prevents the colors seeping into the daisies and makes sure that everything that you want to stay white stays white. Of course, when you're finished, you can take off the masking fluid and then color any areas that you wish to color. But the masking fluid prevents the color seeping into the daisies. You need to keep dipping your applicator into the masking fluid to keep it going. Once the masking fluid is dry, we're ready to paint. So I'm going to start by using one of these clay shaper tools. I'm going to try and use a few different ways of applying the masking fluid so that you can see how each one works. And I'm going to be using, as I said, the Jacksons blue masking fluid so it should pick up on the camera. So here we are. I'm just using a chisel applicator. It doesn't matter what shape. Silicon clay tool you use. Each one, I'll just give a slightly different, different mark. Which can be interesting. Yeah, feel free to experiment. So what I'm doing is I'm blocking in, I'm blocking in the petals and the inner part of the flower. And I'm trying very hard to stay within my pencil marks because we drew them so carefully. And we want to try and keep within those. You see how often I'm having to dip the clay shaper tool back into the masking fluid. And at the moment I'm just using the point here to do the petals. We're going to get all the way around trying to follow our pencil lines so that it looks realistic. Nearly done. These final two close petals to fit together. I'm happy with that. Hopefully you can see that on the film. Now for the stem, you could block it in with either a brush or a clay shaper tool. So let's try and use something different. Let's try and use the ruling pen. Just so we're going to be filling the reading pen with masking fluid and then just drawing down. We might need to refill a couple of times on the way. And let's see how this does. So I would say I've got the prongs are about to Miller Park. Just going to start applying and just roll down slowly. Just give a nice line. And then it just peters out naturally. And that's fine because maybe the bottom of that stem is lost in other foliage, the grass at the bottom. I'm happy with that. That's great. Okay. Work quite well. Wouldn't use through your ruling pen on the daisies though. I think that would be really hard to manipulate, ran the curves and things. So let's do one. Now with a brush. Grabbing my trusty lip self. You can use a slightly wet a bar soap. If you haven't got this, you could use a little bit of petroleum jelly or just anything that will protect your brush a little bit. Okay. So I'm going to just make it into a little point and dip it straight in to the masking fluid. And then we are. And then of course this gives a different sort of application process and a different mark making to the masking fluid. It's actually quite easy to put on with a brush. Here it does feel more natural to me to pet it, put it on with a brush. And more painterly, it'll give them more painterly mark, of course. Okay, let's try and do the line, the line of the stem with the brush. So let's keep my brush quite high up, quite vertical. So he just using the tip, redeploy it. Start from the bottom likely. As the stem gets higher, it gets thicker. So you can press down a bit or they're just going to go over that topic again. I'm not sure I've gotten quite enough on. Then we'll just do a leaf shape here. Okay, I'm gonna go over the rest of this. I'll come back to you when I've done it. Now if you see that your brush has got rather clogged up and it's getting difficult to apply the masking fluid with it. What you just need to do is try and wipe off as much as you can of the masking fluid. Give it a little dip in some water just to try and clean it off. Another wipe. And then go back. Your bar soap or lip self petroleum jelly. Give it another wipe in there. And you'll be good as new, ready to start again. Sometimes it really helps to put a nice blob in the center of the daisy and then just use that blob to create the petals. So you're not constantly dipping into the masking fluid. Finish off this stem. So I'm going to use the end of this case, epitope, which has a daughter on it, but you don't have to use a daughter. You can use the brushes. I'll show a show that too. But this gives a really nice dot. I'm sure you can find something made of metal that you could do this with, even perhaps the end of a pencil or the end of a wooden paintbrush, you could just turn it round, uses the wooden bit. Why don't we, why don't we try that now? Let's take the brush that I use for masking fluid is just going to use this end, not the brushing works, it works really well. Let's try a different way to do it. Now. Let's try a brush instead or do the brush. Brush and see what sort of texture this might give us. Yeah, this will give us something a bit different. I think it's quite nice. A bit down here to maybe a little bit there. Right? Now. Clean your brush as we did before. Just to protect it until the next time. You want to put some more of the grease on it or the bar soap just until next time. Then it's already. Okay. So now we have to wait. We have to wait until all this masking fluid is perfectly dry. Please don't attempt to paint until it is. And what's really tempting and what I've done in the past. And I'll share this with you because I've made a mistake with this is that if you use a hairdryer to speed up the drying process is really not a good idea because what happens is that masking fluid contains a latex. Latex can bind with the paper when it's had heat applied to it. And that can make the latex pull the surface of the paper off when you try and rub it off at the end when you've finished with it. So try not to do that. Try and just wait it out. Don't even put it in the sun or anything like that. Because the heat will help the latex to bind with the paper and you don't want to rip your paper when you come to take it off. So Michael Phelps, a cup of tea or ring a friend, or do something else for a little while. And I'll see you back here when we're ready to paint. 6. Lesson 5 Wash and Salt: So what you're going to need for the next bit is your paints, some water. I'm just a little corner card that I've taken up some packaging. Just to give you a sharp edge. I talk more about that in a little while. Some salt, just a little bit of table salt, some brushes. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is apply water all over the paper, just plain water. With my big brush. You can see that the water because of the masking fluid can't get to these areas. These areas is going to stay nice and clean. The white of the paper when we remove the masking fluid will shine through. Or we can just really play with the paint. We're going to add some texture with the salt. We're going to use that little piece of cardboard for texture as well. We're just going to be able to really free up our painting because we've already applied the masking fluid. Okay, that's nice and wet. Right? Once you've done that, Rhonda mixing some paint. So I am mainly going to be using the greens. I've got here sap green, viridian green, and hookers green. I'll also be using a little bit of cadmium yellow, possibly a bit of cadmium yellow, light, a bit of ocher, possibly, maybe a bit of Van **** brown, burnt sienna. But just use whatever you've got at home. As long as you've got some greens, you'll be fine. Okay, so here we are. We've got slightly damp paper because of the water that we've put onto it. And now we're going to add the paint. Now when we add this wash. We're going to need to make sure it's quite bright, but has a lot of pigment into it. Don't want really pale washes, otherwise your salt technique won't work. You need it to be needing, needed to have some color in it for the salt to work properly. So what we're going to start to do is add some color over the top of it. Now, I want you to think about how your flowers are placed on the paper. Because to me, I can see some really interesting directional lines here. The flowers are all kind of leaning over this way. And I like that. It's giving movement to the painting. And I'm going to continue that with my wash. I'm going to make sure I'm thinking about perhaps streaks of color going this way. To accentuate that and give the paper painting a bit more movement. I think when I apply the paint, I'm going to leave this area fairly light to make it feel like it might be the sky. This area at the bottom will be darker. So it will go dark. Medium tones and light tones. This area is darker because it's denser. There'll be more foliage there. There's more, there's more grass, so therefore there'll be more shadows. So think we're going this way with the paint in my painting. Your painting, of course, might be different, but just look at the natural movement of where you've drawn those flowers. And think about perhaps putting a hint of the sky in with just some pilot tones. Okay, so I'm going to mix up some sap green. Then I'm going to re-wet parts of my paper so that it's all wet. Make sure that the paint can really move around and travel. Because this is the whole joy of this. It's some, it's about watching what the paint does, not having to worry about keeping those areas protected. We can just go straight over the top of them, isn't it? Lovely. Okay, So now I've got my sap green. I'm going to fill my brush with the sap green and I'm just going to drop in and just let the paint go. I'm going to bear in mind that I want this direction as well. Okay, and I want the darkness to be down here. So make sure that you're following those, vary. Those whatever rules you've set for your painting. Where the directions going, whether dark and light should be for trying to follow those. Now I'm going to add in some viridian for a bit of difference to work quite quickly. That's why you shouldn't worry too much about where you're putting your paint, just let it go, let it go way up. Hey, happy with that. Let's try a bit of Hooker's green. Add that as a sort of mid tone. Quite bright hookers green or mind one is anyway. And I want this to look medially. So perhaps I need to tone that down a little bit. I think that's a bit too bright green, emerald green. So I'm going to pick up some yellow ocher and just drop that through it. Give it a slightly more natural feel, a bit muddier. Look. Hope that makes sense. Okay, back to my sap green. Maybe. Look how that's lovely, that's spreading out like that. I really like that. Now, even you could add a bit of blue in this is a bit of aqua marine, French, sorry french ultramarine. Just to make that sort of dense foliage that we were thinking of down the bottom. Adding that in my set at the top here. So we're getting lighter colors at the top. Okay, see how fast you have to work. Now, I'm going to drop in some cadmium yellow. Because perhaps the Sam is catching the leaves and it's creating a bit of yellow. I'm still thinking about that xy direction. Directional think, oh, that's a bit brighter, isn't it? Don't not too keen on that. I might knock that back with a little bit of cobalt. Hello, which is the opposite color to that, yellow, isn't it? So if we use a slightly opposite color, it knocks it back. There we go. That's too bright there as well. A bit more cobalt blue in there. That's it. Good, That's nice, happy with that now. Then also, just make sure that where you've put your daisy, daisy shapes, they're going to be readable. They've got a dark enough background so that you can see them through. So that was a bit lost there. I'm going to ask, am I going to do with this? Let me think. Now, this is a little bit of turquoise. I think I'm going to add a little bit of turquoise in. It's more of a blurry, bluey green. It's quite nice. Just mix it in throughout. Make sure you've got quite a lot of paint on. Too happy about where that line is going. There we go. I'm want to really darken this area now with French ultramarine and viridian green. I know I'm listing off all the paints. But what I mean is just choose a darker green, a darker blue. For these bottom bits. Don't worry too much about the lists of colors I'm giving you. I'm just giving you them in case you want to take notes of them. That's all. As long as it looks a bit darker at the bottom than it does at the top, you'll be doing fine. Okay. So I think we have enough paint on the paper and it's still wet enough to start using some salt. As I said, you do need quite a bit of paint on the paper in order for the salt technique to really work. Okay, so we see how we've got. It's all dark and shaded down this area. And then we're coming up to the sky and it's much lighter at the top. These two lines here, finding them quite distracting. I'm just going to try and block out the bits of tissue paper as if it's just where the papers buckled slightly and the liquid's flowing into those little gaps there where the paper dips down. We're just going to block those out, right? Okay, That's a bit better. I think we've got the lovely dark leading into the mid tones going up to the sky. Now this is where you get your salt. But now the salt. The salt can just be ordinary table salt. What can be sea salt, whatever you choose. But it will only work if the pigment is quite thickly put on and the papers nice and wet, you don't need a lot and you can just put it in little areas. What time what I want it to do is when you sprinkle it on it, the paint will try and move away from the salt. Doesn't always happen straight away. But you can see it's happening a bit there. And the full effect won't be seen until it's completely dried. But it's quite fun because there's no way of controlling this. Actually. I liked that. I liked that about watercolor. Sometimes the unpredictability of it and the mistakes you make, or sometimes the best beats. You know, it's exciting to see what will happen with this. A bit more, maybe a bit down there as well. Okay, That's quite a lot of soul-searching. And now we need to leave that to dry again. And I'm afraid it's a no hairdryer drawing experience again, because the salt will have a better effect if we, if we don't use a hairdryer, it'll just dry slowly. The pigment will push the pigment away and we'll get a much nicer effect. Not the cup of tea. Cool, another friend. What's your favorite TV program? And I'll see you back here. Once it's dried. 7. Lesson 6 Remove the salt and masking fluid: So it's still drying, but we can still work into it with our little piece of cardboard. Just to give it a fine point. You could also use an old bank card or anything like that. And we can create texture using this, whilst the salt is drying. And all I'm going to do is scratching some marks that could be interpreted as little bits of grass. Let's do it very gently. Very gently. You do not want to press really hard. When you see what's happening here. You see that little bit. That's making a little line. Just very, very, very gently. Otherwise you will scrape the top of your paper off. And I'm just thinking about the direction that we talked about before. So obviously you can interpret your own drawing to know where that direction should be headed. Just the paper doesn't need to be a little bit damp to do this properly. And then as the paint dries and settles, it may go into some of the little grooves which you've marked out with your piece of card. I think that's enough. You don't want to go too mad on it. Quite like that. So that's all we can do on this painting until it is dry. So we'll leave it. It may take a good hour for this to dry properly. But don't come back to it until it's really properly dry because the next thing we're going to be doing is brushing the salt off. And we don't want to do that last. The painting is still wet. I'll see you soon. My salt has dried. Now I need to remove it. You can see the texture that it's made already. Started removing it in some places, and it's just made this slightly speckled texture. Here's a good example of it here where it's had a very deep color behind it. Now you can either rub it off with your fingers, which is quite abrasive. Go gently. Crust of it will brush off. You can use a bristle brush. Just help you remove it from the surface. You just want to keep checking. You can really feel it on the surface. It feels terribly gritty on the surface of your painting. Just keep going until all of that has gone. Don't worry if some of the masking fluid starts coming off. It doesn't doesn't matter at all. Not at this stage. But you can see it's made it a little bit rough. Which kind of hint at the possibility of there being little grasses. It'll seed heads you can focus on, but it gives it a nice background. 8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing your painting. I hope you've enjoyed the freedom that masking fluid can give you as a painter. I hope that the salt technique has left you curious about how to create more textures in your work by wishes that you will complete this class feeling inspired to paint more loosely and to see it as something which is good for your whole being. As always, do share your work with the class. Just go to Projects and Resources in the menu bar and click on the Create Project button. Here you can add your photos and your thoughts about your work. I would love to see your work as will other students who take this class. As always, thank you for joining me and for taking this class. And happy painting.