“Sally”

This is Sally, another painting in watercolour, gouache and gold leaf, a celebration of our lovely clear lake at Vobster Quay, where I swim once a week. The source material for this painting was an underwater photograph I took on our first swim of 2017. It was 2nd January. When the lake gets a bit warmer I hope to have a few more subjects not in wetsuits, but for the moment there are a hardcore few of us, though even we have mostly resorted to wearing gloves in these temperatures.

Sally at Vobster, in watercolour, gouache and gold leaf

close-up detail

The highlights of the water at the top are created by scrubbing off some of the paint, but where I wanted very white patches I attacked the painting with a scalpel, to completely remove the paint – there is nothing quite as bright as the bare paper. Of course this made a bit of a mess…

Detail of gold leaf and white highlights in progress

So it then needed smoothing down again with a burnisher. You can’t burnish directly on the painting, but it works very effectively over glassine paper. Here’s my burnisher – it’s made of agate. Originally bought for burnishing gold leaf, but this is not very effective on paper. Pleased to find it is very good at smoothing scratched-up paper instead, this is a very recent discovery so I now expect to be attacking the paper a lot more.

Burnisher and glassine paper

This is a very magnified shot and still the paper is fairly sound looking again. The gold leaf was applied fragment-by-fragment, picked up on the tip of a paintbrush and stuck with the merest hint of gum Arabic, diluted with water.

White highlights after burnishing

Sally at Vobster