Part One: The Making of Some Delicate Rainbow Octopuses
Have you ever been browsing and come across an image that made you stop in your tracks? I think that’s what I was doing when I saw this beautiful rainbow octopus image. I was inspired right away and decided to save it so I could paint it later.
I had this vision of creating a rainbow-colored background with watercolors and painting the outlines of the octopus with white so that it was lacy and delicate. I wasn’t sure how to get the rainbow background that I wanted, so some experimentation was required.
Silly little sidetrack: this is one of those moments where you’re like, “Duh, how did I not notice that before now??” I have a small water bottle that I use when I paint with watercolors. I’ve had it for YEARS. And one day, I noticed that it had space to write in a label, a color label. And I suddenly realized that I could put pigment in the water and then have sprayable liquid watercolor! Who knew??
I quickly went online and bought six more of those bottles. Luckily, my mom had given me some powder watercolors, so I already had the ammunition I needed to create a bunch of liquid colors.
Now, back to our rainbow quest…
I began like I usually do, drawing the octopus on the paper with watercolor markers. When I got the paper wet, I wasn’t as happy with the outcome; it wasn’t what I was envisioning. We’ll come back to this one later.
This is where my rainbow background obsession began. I started by getting the back of the paper wet and spraying the various colors onto the front of the paper. But, of course, the spray bottles are not perfect, and some of the spray patterns came out in oval shapes. Some of them came out in rings with an empty spot in the center. The backgrounds weren’t as fluid as I wanted them to be.
I kept trying and still got somewhat splotchy results. I shifted gears, got the paper wet, and began with regular watercolor pigment as the base, and then sprayed the colors on top of that. This led to a much more intriguing and complex background.
I created seven paintings, and I saved my two favorites for last. I chose what I considered to be the worst background as my first “practice octopus.” That took the pressure off, because if I messed up, it wouldn’t matter as much because it’s just a practice piece, right?
Do you like the colorful backgrounds?
Next, we’ll start adding white outlines! Here’s a sneak peek…
