Another Friday morning art lesson from the Handbook of Watercolour Landscapes Tips & Techniques (p. 309), this time Deb and I learned more about using masking fluid.

Masking fluid can ruin brushes, so we chose inexpensive small rounds and followed the tip to dip the brush into dish-washing liquid (others suggest a bar of soap) to protect the brush from the gummy fluid. Worked well! When the brush points were too large, we switched to using small bamboo skewers to get a finer point. A teacher of mine swears by using a ruling pen, so I may have to invest.

Here are our outputs from the lesson in the book, as well as a small card version I worked up, and a further “playing around” experiment using lots of masking fluid (apologies for the poor photography on the latter).

Cow Parsley 1

Cow Parsley – small card

Cow Parsley 2

Flower Resist

Supplies used: Da Vinci Artist Watercolours, Winsor & Newton Masking Fluid (off white), Arches 140lb Watercolour Paper