My new picture book
Dog on Wheels, to be published by
TroikaBooks in September 2016, has a landscape of pavements – rather dull I thought,
until I discovered the effect of dropping rock salt crystals into very wet
watercolour washes. At first there appears to be nothing happening. However, if you
leave the wash to dry naturally and then leave the salt to do its work over
many hours, the big salt crystals dissolve into much smaller crystals, picking
up pigment and giving a sparkly, grainy, stippled effect – just right for
pavements.
It wasn’t without
its problems, though. I now had a strongly textured background which was
causing a messy outline when I came to paint the foreground objects. So to avoid
this and keep a clean edge, I masked all outlines before the salt wash.
I also discovered it was difficult to apply further washes
over the texture without lifting it, so I put the pigment on very
dry and then it would adhere and colour the crystal stipple.
The more I worked on this book, the more I discovered about pavements. Walking slowly and looking down at them as if from a dog’s or a very small child’s viewpoint, I suddenly started to see all the amazing drain cover patterns; circles, triangles and rectangles with elaborate geometric designs.
And as well as all these patterns there
was all the information in the form of lines, arrows, signs and even shadows.
Suddenly pavements were not dull at all!
