I took out an acrylic painting I'd begun awhile ago ~ two years or so ~ and decided to try something new with it. I tested out an application of liquid masking and rather liked the effect after washing over it with darker colors. Above you can see the result on the right and the newly applied masking dots on the left (not painted over or rubbed off yet). These pictures are just a corner of the whole piece.
The entire canvas is fairly large, which I'll show you next. The original painting was rather exuberant and somehow I felt in the mood to carry that forward, but hoped to connect some of the elements that were previously only sketched in or contained only washes of color. The only problem was that I wasn't sure what I wanted.
So, I tried something new and cut out shapes in painters tape to see the outlines of what I might try.
It seemed to give a general idea and a sort of jungle began to grow. The only problem was that I could not easily see the areas I'd already done in masking fluid so some of it was guesswork. I also wasn't sure if the masking would work out. I've painted with very little water using regular masking tape to create straight lines, but have never tried a fairly watery wash with painters tape.
Here's another part of the canvas with masking fluid dots painted on. The larger green and blue circles are painted rice paper that I'd applied earlier with matte medium. I plan to put blues and purples on top to let these lighter colors show through. Hopefully it will suggest a night sky or the surface of some rock formations or something interesting and imaginative.
The fun of digital editing ~ when I changed the photo to black and white, it reminded me of a lunar surface.
Next steps are to go wild, throw a lot of paint on top and see what happens! But before I go, here are a couple more parts of the original painting before they go.
