For this lesson, we were tasked with addressing a few questions: What happens when you try to remove half-dry paint? Does the tool & support change the effect? How can you make a color gradient using a single stroke?
For the first one, we put some paint on our canvas and let it dry for a bit. We then tried scratching it away with a palette knife to see what would happen. It leaves these scar marks where the paint bulges up on both sides of each mark that goes all the way through. Interestingly though, only about half of the marks do go all the way through. The half-dry paint does provide a bit of resistance as opposed to fully wet paint.
Another attempt was made with the end of a brush. As you can see, the results are much less noticeable. There are a few spots where it actually gets through the paint but it’s mostly just scratches.
To tackle our next question, we tried different methods. As a test, we did black & white before attempting color to see what would happen. In this test, we tried putting black paint & white paint on the canvas directly on the canvas and creating a stroke. While this might work, it probably isn’t very practical as you have little control over the paint (as seen in the above picture)
Our next technique was to just load the brush with the black & white and paint on the canvas that way. This had much better results - you can clearly see the midtones in the strokes. That’s great & all, but what happens when you try it with color as mentioned in the queston?
After trying just that, this was our first result. You can see the green inbetween the blue & yellow, indicating success to some degree. However, we can do better. You can probably tell a hog brush was used for this stroke, so what happens when you try something like a synthetic brush?
This is the result. There are definitely some traces of green but two colors are still pretty separate.
Curving the stroke seems to be better at making a gradient - it allows the two colors to connect better causing them to blend. With more paint, this would probably be the best result.
To recap, half-dry paint is a bit resistant when trying to remove it. The paint won’t come right off as if it were dry. It has a similar effect to wet paint where it will leave a scar and bulge on the sides, but is definitely not as smooth as wet paint. The best way to create a gradient in a single stroke is to load the brush with two colors and manuever the brush in a way where both colors can interact with each other (in our test, we curved the stroke.)
