It's a delight to welcome Leslie Lambert as our newest gallery artist! Leslie is a prestigious artist particularly celebrated for paintings using her distinct 'Watercolor Pour' technique. We are sharing a post below that she wrote about the phases of her workflow along with several glitches she encountered along the way. Stay through to the end for a video of Leslie unmasking a recent work.
Watercolor Pour is a time-intensive process requiring skillful use of color and creativity.
CLICK HERE for video sampling of unmasking of a recent poured watercolor!
Here's Leslie's words:
I am a huge fan of textile art, and especially quilting, often wishing that I knew how to quilt. However, that is not my gift. So instead I 'paint' quilts. In this case, I 'poured the paint' for my quilt.
The reference for this painting was at my friend Pam's quilting studio. Pam makes quilts with vibrant colors and I photographed her work and some of her tools. I knew immediately that I had a new subject for a pour. Below is my step by step process of this pour:
I always start off my painting with a drawing. The pins took a long time to draw as I wanted to make sure the lines were dark enough that they would not fade as I poured successive layers of paint over them.
After masking out my whites and pouring the first pour, this is what it looked like.
Next I masked out my lightest areas and poured again. On this pour, my paper dried too quickly and my colors blended too well. I wanted more separation of the colors and realized I should have had more splashes of blue. It was difficult to keep the orange and blue from mixing.
Going darker. I lost the blue again and also lost some of those pins and needles. I decided that overmasking was better than undermasking as I could paint in the details later.
This became my final pour even though I felt like the quilt was still too light. I still found the paper drying too quickly and it was a struggle getting the colors to move in the way I preferred.
To go darker on the area under the bowl and not mask again, I wet the quilt area and dropped in the blue, also adding more blue into the bowl with the pins. With my brush, I added more detail and color to the pins, needles, and threads. The final image is seen here and at the top of this post.
