CHENG KEE CHEE'S SATURATED WET TECHNIQUE FOR PORTRAITS

I have noticed on Sandy Maudlin and Rhonda Carpenter's blogs some beautiful paintings done in the saturated wet technique first introduced by Cheng Kee Chee, the master of this idea. I have developed a modified version for portraits that I thought I would share. I have not had the privilege of taking a workshop with Mr. Chee but learned this process from a workshop in Michigan from Roland Roycroft. I love his landscapes and wanted to learn how he did them, so I took a workshop vacation up in Michigan a few summers ago. I was not capable of mentally processing the way Roland does in his poured landscapes. He masks out both positive and negative shapes at the same time. My brain could not think this way. I could do one or the other, but not both at the same time. In the middle of the week Roland introduced the saturated wet technique and I fell in love with it. I always want to do portraits but I found that I could not wipe out accurately without some markers. I reasoned that if I drew the image on the page and then painted in the darks with a staining thalo blue I could then wash it off, soaking the paper and load it back up with beautiful rich color and wipe back out with accuracy because you could see the thalo blue on the paper. It worked!!! I love the unexpected color in untraditional places that this process produces. This image is from a photo that my father took of me as a little girl. I made the mistake of stapling the paper too close to the image so it is not able to go successfully under a mat. Perhaps I could trim the paper and float the image. It is these small details we need to keep in mind or they will trip us up in the final result.