Watercolour mosaics

As you know I have been dabbling in what I like to call watercolour mosaics. By that I mean painting as if the painting was made up of little tiles. However I could not find the right approach yet. Even though I liked making these paintings they were still not quite what I had in mind. Someone suggested that might be because there was no space between the tiles I painted and she was right of course.

So now I have found the perfect little helper for that. It's called a masking fluid marker. Of course I knew of the existence of masking fluid, but only the kind you apply with a brush and that just didn't seem precise enough, so I never used it (I don't even own any). But when I came across these markers by Molotow I knew that they were meant for me, so I bought two, experimented a little and then I was ready for the big test: some real watercolour mosaics. Here's how that turned out: 

You can see the markers here above the book. They write in blue and work just like any ordinary paint marker.

I am very pleased with the result. You simply draw the lines with the markers. I use templates and a ruler to get my lines so straight by the way. Then you colour the shapes in and afterwards you can remove the masking fluid by rubbing it off. I suggest using a kneadable eraser for that, it saves a lot of mess. The marker I have comes in 2 and 4 milimeter width. They do take a little patience to use especially with a ruler and such, because you are basically applying a kind of rubber that sticks to everything and regularly have to wipe both the ruler and the tip to keep the work clean, but it's a small price to pay for having such a precise masking tool.

Here are the pages a bit closer up:

As always these were done in the Fodder Book, which is a big Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.

I will definitely be making more of these now that I finally have the means to do them as I intended! Hope you like them too and hope I've given you a little tip for an art supply that might come in really handy if you need to mask off precise lines.

Have a wonderful and artsy day all!