Correcting Watercolor

                                           Pears and Apple  9x9 watercolor

This little painting was stuck in my portfolio for weeks because I didn't know what to do for a background. Then one day I was leafing through an older copy of one of my watercolor magazines when I found an article by Ann Abgott. She's the one who inspired me to paint the fruit in the first place. She had a still life of fruit with a really dark background. It made the fruit just pop on the page. So, I decided to try it. First I tried Payne's gray on a wet background. Not only did it look dull, the paint started to seep into my nice pristine fruit, and they were dry! I sat a babysat it, dabbing away at the seeping paint until it dried enough to stop. When it was completely dry I went around all the edges of the fruit with a masking fluid. Then I mixed my own dark with Windsor green and alizarin crimson. I was much happier with this color, it just seemed livelier than the Payne's gray. The next mistake I made was painting the background down to far on my painting which caused the apple to look like it was floating. I had nothing to loose so I decided where the line should be and started scrubbing all the dark below that line, 3 or 4 inches. All those staining colors were very stubborn, I attacked with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser sponge. I got off as much as I could, burnished the poor bruised paper and coated it with Aquacover Liquid Watercolor Paper. You have to be really close to see the correction but I cropped the painting quite close and into a square shape to minimize the visible amount of correction. Who says you can't correct a mistake in watercolor?