Here is my latest watercolor painting, entitled Threads of Friendship. My daughter has quite the large collection of embroidery floss from her years of making friendship bracelets for all her friends. The painting is based on one of many photographs I took of her collection.

I started the painting a little differently than usual. The painting has a wide range of colors, and since I use a small palette with only 8 wells and 8 mixing areas, I decided to paint areas by color. Starting with the greens, then purples, then yellows and neutrals. I then painted the background and finally the floss wrappers last. The wrappers were extremely challenging to paint, as most of the lettering is white and I don’t use white paint as a transparent watercolor artist. I tried a new masking fluid, Fineline Masking Fluid Pen Supernib – Fine Tip, which worked ok, once I got the hang of it. Not quite as good as I hoped, but better than what I’ve used in the past. I still had to do quite a lot of reverse painting to work around the letters. You may click on the following slide show to see my work in progress.