How I Found My Style ~ Watercolor Stipple
If you have a couple minutes I wanna tell ya about why I paint the way that I paint. I’ve been doing this for the past 3 years after inheriting a watercolor paint set that was my grandpa’s. He passed away when I was 13 or 14. He was the one who taught me how to read. He would take me and my sister on walks along the lake and encourage us to explore. Before I was born he was a professor at the Art & Design College down the street from where I stay at now.
Six or seven years after his death, in 2020, I was getting ready to move to a village in the countryside when grandma was going through the closet and found his paints. She sent them with me. At that time I didn’t paint. I didn’t make much art. It wasn’t on my radar- other than maybe doodling. It wasn’t a part of my Life. I was a writer above all. And she just gave me this set from him that I could take with me and try out. So I did. I brought it with me to Pennsylvania.
I only ever got a chance to paint, or have any free time really, when it would rain. Usually we would be working in the garden or in the fields every single day. If not that, I was attending to the needs of other community members for whom I was a caregiver.
I would have one day off, but on the other six days a week were for working outside, doing physical labor and whatnot. Trust that I did not have many responsibilities by comparison to some of the other amazing folks I met there.
I loved it. I can easily look back and know that the 6 months I volunteered to be there was the healthiest time of my Life. I loved having a couple hours, or even a day off if we would have flooding or lightning and thunderstorms. During those times I would go sit on the back porch, facing the forest facing French Creek, and I would sit there under the awning and play with paint.
One time it struck me that I should just hold my paper out from under the awning and let the raindrops fall and wet the paper, to splatter onto it. I first tried making traditional landscapes, architectural drawings, just free-handing whatever my hand wanted to come up with and letting my hand take the lead. A lot of these earlier pieces were quite abstract as well. I thoroughly enjoyed the process but none of the results struck me as ‘good.’
After a couple times of doing this, wetting the paper with the rain, I had a giant splatter on the center of one of the papers and I took the color on my tiniest little brush (size one) and started filling in the droplets with color. I did rainbow ones, blue, purple, green. I just kept doing that over and over because I loved the result. You had like a swirl of color, light and dark, all within this one little, tiny drop. That up and down motion of the brush on the paper, just dotting and dotting away. Just something about that. I got hooked. I have not stopped. I no longer use rainwater to paint but I’ve been thinking about doing that again. Rainwater, lake water, pond water, creek, or river water… anything.
I remember vividly a time when I was still staying out in Pennsylvania and my friend Dora, she’s also a watercolor artist (among many things) came and got me and we took our paints and our papers down to a little footbridge that crosses over the creek. It was pouring rain. We were sitting out there getting froze. It was early spring probably, late spring maybe, and we were sitting out there in the cold enjoying ourselves. As we painted all the color of every stroke we made just got rinsed away.
So I guess that answers the question of why and how I got started doing this process and this style. It doesn’t really answer why I continue. I feel kind of neurotic for doing this, but I cannot stop.
