Works at home #3 - painting on water

Painting on water!!

 

I was inpired to do this work after I saw a kind of nail art called Marble Nail art. It is baisically placing drops of nailpolish onto water, creating a pattern. Then they would stick their finger into the center of the pattern, into the water, and the pattern would stay on their fingers. Here's a videoooo~~~ :

 

it creates beautiful patterns on the surface of the water, and it comes out beautifully on the nails too~~

But this lead me to another kind of  art!! And this is LATTE ARTT!! this kind of  "art" requires lots of skill and practice and i really enjoy watching videos on it. Here are some of my favourites~

Impressive huh! and now we see how they do some of the simple designs~~

This is alittle different from the marble nail art as it is only made up of two very neutral colours unlike the vibrant colours of the marble nail art. However i love the both of them.

the marble nail art is creative and the images can be taken out of the water while the latte art requires skill, creates amazing results.

i noticed one thing in common was that they use sticks to swirl around, creating beautiful patterns and i was wondering if i can bring that to a higher level and this is when i came across this: enjoy!!

I was curious, so i searched for " painting on water" and i was amazed by what it creates and without knowing the name of this form of art, it took me quite alot of work to find out what it is called. And this beautiful art technique is called Ebru!

This is a Turkish art and it baisically involves paint on water and after the pattern is completed, it is lifted off using a piece of water.

I do not have the special equiptment and paint that these painter has, so i used my sink and some paint ( i used Mr Hobby's Mr Color paint

I use this for my BJD's face up ( it is just like painting the facial features/ doing makeup for the doll e.g eyeliner, blush, lips etc)

I figured that this would work better that water soluable paint as the paint will not just dissolve every where and just stay on the surface where it would be picked up by the paper.

And in addition, i also tried nailpolish but instead of using the nail, i used paper to pick up the pattern.

First off is this:

This is the first on i did, using nailpolish. Due to the limited color i have, i used only green and yellow. and i think due to the quality difference interms of the nailpolish, it dried and hardened very fast on the surface which did not allow me to have many layers. and it spreads out and thin out too fast, much faster than the ones in the videos i've seen. But i would rate it quite sucessful for a first try as it came out quite nicely with an interesting pattern.

Then i went on to experiment with the Mr Color paint:

 

IT CAME OUT SO BEAUTIFULLYYYYY

For this paint, it did not limit it self to only layers, but is also able to create these thin whisps of color that looks very beautiful on paper. this looks like an image of ink dripping into water. however, i think this one is not as sucessul as the colors are not spread out and too concentrated in a corner.

But.........

I could'nt "unsee" the fact that it really looks like a person with thick long hair coming down from the corner of the paper. so i took a pen and lined it. I though it was not a bad idea so i did more of it and drew on them like this:

This is like a face of a person blowing out a bubble (maybe) or the yellow one can be a speech bubble. I think it looks very nice this way too. It i a twist to this art technique, where drawing is also applied to it~

Seeing that many of my works, the colours are all too concentrated in one corner, i decided to copy what the artists in the videos do, splatter the paint around.

From my research, placing some soap into the water would help the paint better adhere to the paper so i added some shampoo ( i know its weird but it was the most convinient thing near the sink) . And then the shampoo created sooo much bubbles on the surface of the water. i tried to scoop them up to remove them but i thought: what kind of patterns would be created if there are bubbles to create more texture? so i left the foam in the sink and took the paints and started splattering. First the white, then the red and finally the black. But to my dismay, the colors were in tiny balls on its own and that's when i realized that the paint had some oil in it and so it will not spread out like how the nail polish does.

Then it struck me. I've see the same techinque of using the stick/ skewer to swirl the colors around in all three different kinds of art and i went ahead and took the back of my paintbrush and swirlled the colors around. However, due to the thick layer of foam on the surface, i was unable to see the pattern made and decided to go on and place the paper on. To my surprise, it came out gorgeous!!!!! and here it is:

i painted the back ground with a light pale blue with a little bit of irridiscent in it to give abit of shine

it shows resemblance to this: whch is black ink in water.

 

I think i would consider this as a piece of my art work, where it has a finished look and i think its asthetcally pleasing. i think this would be a pretty simple and easy way to make simple card designs or maybe just some simple patterns. To bring it further, i am considering using this technique as a background for my future paintings. And i would really want to try using oil paint mixed with oil on water in a big tub.

Thats all for this post~~ hope you enjoyed!!!!!