Red fans

Red fans - student project

I experimented with white space for the first time in watercolor. All these years I was afraid of leaving blank spaces within the painted area and worked more with continuous gradients and blends in one area. 

Red fans - image 1 - student project

For example, my first instinct painting these fans would have been to do a wet on wet technique, put my red pigment, let it dry, then add the black on top and try to minimise the blooms and splatter effect. 

This time I decided to paint the black first, let it dry, and then fill in each red section separately making sure it barely touched the black if at all. 
I had fun doing it, I really had, and it really did allow me to have a much more vivid result than if I painted the whole read area as a solid block.

And it shows that you are never too seasoned and artist to learn new tricks