Splatter Me, Elmo

All righty then, lets say you're working on your latest production, figuring "this is the one, this is my break through masterpiece..me, Manuel El Boffo, I'm a natural born watercolor geenyus." Well, you should know better cuz this is about the time it all starts to go wrong. Very wrong or a little wrong either way, now you have the opportunity to play, to fix, perhaps to retrieve from the clutches of doom your unsinkable confidence. Or you pitch it out and start again...I am a fixer upper, a salvager, an inveterate reclaimer...a cheapskate and stubborn. So what, you say?

Well, this is what:

Exhibit A

I would just carry on and paint on the back of this but I already have, this is on the back of a sheet of 140 arches cold. Its rubbish, so I decided to play with "splatter". Seemed like a good pic to use as an experiment/demo.

I have tried to push my darks and created an area on the left that is too dark and opaque. So splatter it is. You can use a springier bristle synthetic round or whatever. Any opaque colours will do and you can mix them with Chinese white or not.

My favourites are cobalt violet, cerulean blue and Naples yellow. The cads co-operate too. You can splatter with darks, say f'rinstance a mix of ultramarine and burntumb.

Just tap your loaded brush with your pointer finger and you are in business.
You can splatter with a big brush or a rigger into wet paint or dry. You can also flick your wrist and really let 'er fly.

Splatering is useful for colour variation wet in wet or in transition areas where you want to soften the border. It works for highlites or details. Cover the area you don't want to splatter with scrap paper and let'er rip.

This painting is still rubbish but it does show how splatter can be used. That you can splatter light over dark if you have a passage that needs lightening or detailing.