Colours

Testing.

ochre, sap green, cadmium red

emergent properties

I have been working for well over a year on a very time-intensive watercolour art project (details to be revealed at a later date but <wink wink> it involves biodiversity, paint, and Haiku!). Over the course of my summer vacation, I reached a rather high level of obsession as I worked to finish up a dozen or so pieces. Every day I would set up at a large table, bring out my paints and brushes, and I always placed tester-pages underneath and beside the work I was focusing on.

These tester sheets of watercolour paper (or sometimes I just used mixed medium paper) were used to dab a brush to ensure I was using the correct amount of water, so little drops of paint accumulated on the pages. I also used the pages to test colours, ensuring it was correct and modifying the mix if it wasn’t.

Having tester pages is always part of doing watercolours, but after several hours, or sometimes a day, I would turn over the tester paper or start a new one, and after a week or so, I realized there was an accumulation of these colourful pages. When stepping back and looking at them, I was astounded – they were colourful, magical, messy, and a symbol of a busy artist. When seeing a section with lots of yellows and orangesI was reminded when I worked on a piece depicting a common shelf fungi called Chicken of the Woods. When seeing hues of green I was reminded of splashing colour on the piece depicting an aquatic plant. Every section of the tester papers tells a story. Every sheet has patterns, and reveals something to the observer. Or, maybe I’m overthinking it – they are just messy and that’s ok too.