watercolors to a digital piece of art.

Just a small “How I did this” – I started with a series of watercolors, done on a watercolor block. – very wet on wet technique, just using strong colors, to bleed out. Some of them, i masked a section, making a rectangular shape that cut across the paper. – After the painting dried. I coated it with a thick gum arabic solution and then used a hot blow dryer to quickly dry the surface and create cracks on the sticky gum arabic. . . . you never knew what you would get, sort of the fun part of the project. – Once the gum arabic dried, you have a nice slick surface with cracks. So now I mixed up a nice a dark indigo color, washed down the whole image, let it set for a  minute or two, then I buffed it away like i was wiping a copper etching plate, careful not to lift out any pigment in the cracks, only want to remove the surface color . . . following? – what I got was the dark stain to stay in the cracks. . . . after a day of drying, I popped it off the block. – I painted about 30 different pieces. some even had an image in the center. Sold most.

So now I have some patterns and watercolor textures. . . . I added them to a digital piece I was working on. – Put a clipping mask onto 3D objects I created in Adobe illustrator. a few actually. see below details.

The bottom image is close to the finished version.