Probably the quickest, most soul-destroying way of wrecking your latest watercolour creation is to tart it up with masking fluid. Whenever I uncap the stuff and draw out yards of quivering goop from around the neck of the bottle, I'm reminded of the time I recklessly decided to clean out the plughole in someone else's bath. Oh and did I tell you that it smells? The ammonia is to preserve the shelf-life, apparently, but every time I take a whiff, I feel like it's shortening mine.
If you own a bottle of masking fluid and you go to a watercolour class regularly, my advice is, be generous with it. Let everyone have a dip. I've never got to the bottom of a single bottle before it has dried out and begun to reek like a drain.
Leave masking fluid on your brush for too long and it will harden into a yellowish bogey that nothing will dislodge. And one last thing: it can tear holes in your paper, too.
So why use it?
Well, it's an effective way of creating highlights and details without having to painstakingly paint around them. It's hard to use it subtly, however and it will conjure up toothpaste more readily rather than either apple blossom or snow.
Here's a simple exercise that gets you used to handling the stuff and will give dramatic results relatively easily.
Sketch your old building lightly. This is HB pencil on Neil Hopkins' finest 300lb Two Rivers hand-made watercolour paper. It's so well-sized that even the finest line will sing out at you (the size also makes the surface so hard that the masking fluid will lift off like a dream). Now, the idea of the pencil sketch is to give you a delicate framework on which to hang your colours. Anything heavier and you'll end up with a design that would look more at home in a colouring book. And colouring-in is not painting.
Don't use your finest sable for the next bit, just in case. I used a 1/4 inch Daler Rowney, one stroke nylon brush, which I first dipped in washing-up liquid. Then I gave the brush a cursory wipe so that my painting didn't start to foam when I added water and... poked it gingerly into the masking fluid. Work lightly over the roof and put a flick or two on the door and window it you like. You don't need to cake the stuff on and if you do, well, it takes longer to dry than margarine. This is the thing. It'll harden onto the hairs of your brush faster than you can say 'chewing-gum', but on your paper, it's a different matter. And your paper should be bone dry, by the way.
Rinse your brush in water immediately and thanks to the patina of Fairy Liquid, every single hair will be pure and unsullied by its baptism in masking fluid.
When the masking fluid is dry, it might still feel cold and tacky if you tap it lightly with a finger, but none of it should come away. Wait longer than is absolutely necessary if you like. Mind-bending boredom is far better than the agony of swishing your finest sable impetuously over a patch of nearly dry masking fluid and watching little gobbets of jaundiced rubber spring onto the hairs of your brush and cling there... forever.
While you are trying to coax the paint to go where you want it to, there are two great, natural forces at work on your watercolour which will pay no heed to your wishes whatsoever. These are gravity and entropy. We all know what the first one does, even if the greatest scientists aren't sure of the details and the second governs the way that things, when left to their own devices, tend to dissipate and become chaotic. Think about how a curl of smoke from a cigarette will eventually fill a room. The curl has gone, but the smoke hasn't; it's just spread out all over the place and given us all cancer. In the same way, pigment will travel, will-nilly through damp paper, bumping over the grain and settling in minuscule nooks and crannies. You don't actually need a brush. Just leave your watercolour to gravity and entropy and the result will be far more natural than you could ever aspire to. So, turn your paper upside-down and wet it, from the foundations of your building to the sky. Then, tip the painting towards you and run palette mud right across it.
I have another term for palette mud. I call it Colour Remain After Painting. That way, when people ask me what pigments I used for my latest masterpiece, I can say, "Oh, just any old CRAP."
But if you don't have a brownish, greyish leftover stain in the lid of your watercolour box, then try gamboge, sepia and a little paynes grey. Actually, I used Schmincke Translucent Yellow. It does exactly the same job at half the price. Oh, and I used Neutral Tint, not Paynes Grey, but I thought you might not have that one in your box.
This is important: Use the softest, thirstiest brush you own for this wash or you'll put streaks in your sky. And once you've put the colour on, prop up your painting and walk away. You might need to guide the colour over the masking fluid but after that, do try to leave the rest of the work to those natural forces. If you're British, you'll make a cup of tea at this juncture. I'm convinced this is the only reason why the British, more than any other nation, have taken to watercolours so thoroughly. Their only rivals are the Japanese. And they have made such an art out of their tea-making that the watercolour hardly gets a look-in.
Once your background is bone dry, more 'crap' can be added to the building and the horizon. You'll need to heavy up the consistency for this bit as it needs to sit over the previous wash. And I've used the same flat brush as before to get a graphic, hard-edged look to the work.
I've put even more 'crap' on the gable end of the building and on the barn doorway. By now, you'll need fairly inky paint. If the first wash was milk, these little details should be in single cream. The mess in the foreground is me experimenting with an old, plastic credit card. Just a little random tone here will make your paper look more like snow and less like, well, paper.
And now for the best bit.
Gently rub the masking fluid with your finger or a putty rubber, to reveal the shockingly white surface beneath. And if the paper should come away with the mask, then perhaps the fluid was too old or the paper was damp or simply not of a good enough quality.
Finally, the telegraph pole. It's there to balance the composition, actually and heighten the loneliness of the scene in an ironic way, not to provide the irascible old misanthrope who lives in my shed with a way of communicating with his loved ones.
You've come a long way since your piece of paper was nothing but virgin wood pulp and cotton; you've negotiated the manifold dangers of working with a gimmick like masking fluid and now you're going to ruin it all with one of those finishing touches that will, rather than enhance your painting, reveal your ineptitude to the rest of the world. The devil, they say, is in the details and this one was done with the credit card again, dipped in the same kind of 'crap'. If it looks slightly ragged and incomplete, leave it. Reality isn't pin-sharp everywhere all the time.
The colours look different on this final image, by the way, because I scanned it rather than relying on the dubious picture quality of my 'phone.
Here's another, more complicated effort. The trees are little, random gaps between broad applications of masking fluid and the twigs, branches and details on the barn were put on with a cut up credit card and a palette knife. The paper, once again, is 300lb hand-made cotton and flax from Two Rivers.
