During the pandemic quarantine I came across an artist whose work in negative painting fascinated me. Her watercolors were vibrant and the negative painting created beautiful depth to the paintings. I wanted to learn her secrets. I also wanted to support an artist whose work I admired so I purchased her DVD and learned (at least some of) her secrets. Her name is Susan Crouch. The tutorial I painted is called Carolina Morning.

Susan includes a printout of the wrens on a branch with a couple of leaves to help get you started. After drawing in the wrens, I masked off that part and layed down a wash of color for the lightest background. Then I followed her instructions for painting the wrens.

The shapes and layout of the rest of the leaves are left to the individual painter to create. Following her guidelines I painted in my first layer of leaves. Or maybe I should say, I painted around my first layer of leaves! This is negative painting— to paint the shapes and space around your subject.

As those shapes dried, I began painting some texture and leaf veins inside some of the top leaves. I also negative painted more leaves behind the top leaves.

Negative painting requires a lot of thought process and you don’t want to go too dark too fast if you want multiple layers and depth. It took me days to complete the painting because each layer needs to be completely dry before adding more paint. It was also hard trying to keep from making my colors muddy in the layers.

This style of painting appeals to me because I love trying to achieve various textures and depth in watercolor. I learned so much in following Susan Crouch’s tutorial and can’t wait to try the technique in more paintings. I looked back at a much earlier post of trying to learn simple negative painting and am glad to see I’m making progress!

Have you tried negative painting? It’s a good workout for your brain!