Painting Clear Glass Images Using Watercolors

The painting to the right titled “Happy Hour” is one I did for an art club challenge.  The challenge was to incorporate three elements into the painting including fruit, fish and a flower.   Of course, the first thing was to brainstorm about possible combinations and scenes. 

I wanted to be a bit humorus, so I chose what you see.   I was then concerned about how to paint the background that shows through the clear glass including the stem of the glass.  So I went to Google and did a search on images to get a martini glass.  I made a black and white print of the one I liked in order to get proper values (i.e. depth of colors).  You can also look at some clip art to get ideas for this. 

As you can see, I only painted some of the background showing through the glass.  I also used different values for the background color which helped give the appearance of liquid in the glass.  Also see the background painted in the stem and pedestal of the glass.  This gave the painting the appearance of light coming from the left side and helped to produce the image of clear transparent glass.

After painting the olives and goldfish in the glass, it was obvious that I had to do something to make them appear in the glass rather than outside it.  I did this by using a razor blade to scratch some lines into the painting.  See where the lines of the glass and the liquid level are etched onto the olive.  Also see where the goldfish has some lines etched into it to make it appear inside the liquid.

By the way, I never use white in any of my paintings.  I leave the paper unpainted in areas which I want to remain white.  I will either use liquid frisquet to mask out an area or just paint around the areas that I want to leave white.  It takes some planning but it works very well for me. 

Happy painting!

Catherine Brown