Round and round and round

After experimenting with my newly acquired airbrush on my String Theory-themed pieces, I realized it was something I wanted to pursue further. With practice, I’m confident I could master the technique. At the very least, it would provide me with hours of amusement..  

I am fortunate to have a body of water behind my residence, such that the reflections of surrounding foliage on the water are both tantalizing and mesmerizing.  

I’ve decided to paint water with a multitude of colors using my airbrush.

This time, I’m adding a twist by using metallic paint. I associate the shimmer of water with the sparkle of metallic paint, and I hope it will bring a some impressionistic realism.

I have a bottle of gold metallic acrylic paint that I use for my gilded calligraphy on greeting cards. I experimented with it in my airbrush to see if it would work.

However, I quickly realized that the acrylic paint was too thick to aerosolize. It was quite different from trying to airbrush ink or watercolor. I had to dilute it significantly to make it spray. Unfortunately, the resulting spray was too watery, and I worried that the metallic sparkle would be lost.

But I was wrong! The sparkle returned after the paint dried, which was surprisingly fast. Repeated spraying helped build up the color saturation.

Encouraged by my success, I ordered a box of 18 colors metallic acrylic pouring paint from an online store. I thought the pouring paint might be less viscous. Instead of using special solvents, I diluted the paint with plain water. I assumed that the label said the paint was water-based, so I figured water would be an acceptable diluent.  

 

The painting I had in mind was about a white egret taking off from water, which was dotted with circular ripples.  I figured since I had no control of the air brush, I could at least spray round circles, over and over again.  It would be like doodling.  Child's play. This is absolutely contrary to what I was taught in Chinese Brush, in that we tried not to cover up our brushstrokes with repetitions.

I decided I was braving new frontiers (new toy actually) and I would not genuflect to the strict doctrines of traditional Chinese Brush.  I used the thin translucent cicada skin Xuan however.  The paper had a nice natural sheen to it.

I knew where I wanted to position my egret so I cut out a template for my bird.  I used that template to block out any sprays from my air brush.  With that done I proceeded to spray my background with a blue metallic acrylic.

I was using a chopstick to mix and dilute my paint in the paint receptacle.  I didn't want to waste whatever paint that was clinging to my chopstick, so I dapped the paper with the stick to form circles like ripples.  I had this wild idea of modeling my ripples.  I kneaded strings using my scrap Xuan paper and I fashioned them into circles and plotted them on the paper.

Well that was a disaster.  The strings of paper were so light that any spray from the air brush would blow them out of place.  It was an exercise in futility.  Even the cutout mask I made for my egret had to be weighted down.  It took me about 5 seconds to realize how stupid my idea was.  Free-hand spray it would be.  After all the whole idea of doing ripples was so that precision was not called for, taking into account that this was something novel for me.

I kept reaching for different colors from my box of 18, using both the air brush and regular brush (it took time to clean out my air brush after each spray, since the acrylic dries rather quickly and can clot up my sprayer).  I seemed to have painted with aplomb, which in reality I was too naïve to worry about whether the lines were in the right place or not.  The spray was sort of diluted and wet.  The diluted paint made it difficult to see if there was overlap or coverage or how wide the spray pattern was.  After a while nothing mattered anymore.  I could picture myself with a robotic arm, seemingly dancing with a mind of its own.  Gyrating to the cadence of the hiss from the airbrush. 

What made it more difficult, or interesting, was that depending on where the light source was, different colors would manifest.  The photos showed the void left by my mask of the egret.