For a couple of years now — as long as I’ve been doing watercolor — I’ve had this idea to do a painting with big blocks of color. Pointillism with really big points; Mondrian without the black lines. 🙂
So today I finally tried it out, with a painting of a cup done in the style. What to call it? Someone said it reminds them of the compression artifacts on Comcast – comcastism? BigPointilism? Artifaction? Doesn’t really matter. It’s basically a kind of mosaic, something that I did many decades ago with small glass tiles and really loved. That is probably where the idea originates, at least in me.

I did it in class Wednesday morning with Cheryl Long; she helped me work up a palette from the paints I had on hand. I painted fairly thick watercolor for the cup, and more watery for the shadow. I really enjoyed doing it; it’s very intense to paint with such large blocks of color because you have to see what to do, and the object is not very informative as to how it’s going to work. 🙂
Here is the palette I used:

The paints on the left were for general blocks; the two on the right, a red and a green, were for accents. Yes, I forgot the shadow for the handle. But not too bad for a study. Learned a lot.