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.
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.
CLICK HERE for video sampling of unmasking of a recent poured watercolor!
