A Fuzzy Background

Aged Fencing - A Fuzzy Background - 26.5cm x 19cm (10.5" x 7.5")
Watercolour on Paper

Claudia Nice uses soft focus backgrounds for both her examples from the Aged Fencing topic in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor.

This type of background is usually painted wet-on-wet. The challenge is if you try to paint around the foreground shapes, it is difficult to create a cohesive backdrop. Some people can do this, but I’ve ended up with sections that look like they come from different paintings. 

A popular solution is to mask the foreground shapes so you can paint over them. Recently, Steve Mitchell (the Mind of Watercolor) demonstrated how he does this with a combination of masking tape and masking fluid (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTpTZUZ_PA8&t=295s)

The technique worked well for Steve, so I gave it a go. I scaled up the thumbnail from the top of Thumbnail Sketches, masked off the stile, fence and some foreground foliage, so it looked like this.

Aged Fencing - All Masked Up - 26.5cm x 19cm (10.5" x 7.5")

Once the masking fluid was dry, I painted the background over it, left it to dry and then removed the masking to leave the slightly fuzzy setting for the fence - all I have to do now is paint the difficult stuff.