Watercolour painting of 'primitive' pottery

I had fun with this, nearly. 

I decided to paint the primitive-looking pottery using Schmincke Horadam supergranulating paints and they worked well but I couldn't quite achieve a satisfying result. In my efforts to do so, I managed to damage the surface of the Strathmore watercolour journal, which isn't difficult to do. Also, again, masking tape caused the surface of the paper to tear. Sigh. 

I tried using various Daniel Smith metallics on the pottery but it look wrong so the only place that has it is the bottom pot. 

I wanted to achieve an interesting background but with a lot of space and I faffed around with that. I was happy with my choice of Daniel Smith 'Buff Titanium' which is granulating, but I wanted there to be a bit more to it. 

Watercolour 'primitive' pottery

I had bought a Tim Holtz 'spider-web' stencil and tried that but despite using a dryish brush to dab on the chosen watercolour (not very watery), the effect was pathetic and the stencil ineffective. In the end, what I did was get a very pointy well-sharpened watercolour pencil and I traced around the inside of the stencil shapes and although it doesn't look like a spider's web, not really, I do like the result. I chose the watercolour pencil because I thought I might want to blur the pencil lines but chose, in the end, to leave it as it is.

Lastly, what to do with the torn white border?  Don't laugh. I tried gold metallic paint by Daniel Smiths, and hated it. The paint is beautiful but it was wrong. Then, like a fool, I tried Schmincke Horadam opaque 'Mars Black', and that looked even worse, too harsh. But sometimes, you know, out of failure comes success. I blurred the gold metallic paint with the matt black and liked it. It has the right effect for the job, I think. 

And that was all there is to it. 😂