How to Paint with Wine?

Wine and tea, both have a contrary effect on your senses. While tea makes you agile and active, the wine will relax you in falling into a deep and ecstatic slumber. However, you can get addicted to both of them.

Yet, there is another thing that you can do with them. You can paint with both tea and wine. So, dust off your wine glasses and goblets and let us fill them with different colours of wine to paint the canvas in myriad hues of purple.

What will you need?

You will need the following material to make the wine.

• Both wine and tea are water-soluble. So, paraphernalia used for painting with watercolours will do.
• A watercolour paper is very delicate. For the beginning, use watercolour block or canvas as they are a little sturdy.
• A bottle of red wine. Now, it will depend on your choice of what you can afford. Go for a darker tone while purchasing as you can dilute it further for making additional hues. 2-3 ounces will do, the rest of the bottle can rest in your tummy, pun intended.
• For starters, try simple designs. A size 2 and size 10 brush will be fine with a watercolour palette.
• Paper towels and cloth

If you do not have a pre-soaked water block for wine painting, prepare a watercolour paper. Wet the watercolour paper at corners and fix it with paper tape to a canvas, desk or board. Paper tape sticks when it becomes wet. Let it dry for two hours. Wine is mostly water and its texture from usual watercolours is entirely different. So, the paper is secured to avoid any w=unwanted folds in the painting.

If your wine cellar has a wide variety of wines, feel free to use Merlot, Cabernet, Shiraz, Syrah, Petite Sirah or Malbec for a more purplish colour. Red wines may have hints of orange, brown, magenta or brick that can be obtained from Tempranillo, Nebbiolo or Sangiovese. White wines can appear greenish, but not on paper.

How to start?

Preparing the wine
For a dense wine, chose from Italian wines. Wine manufacturers from Italy intentionally choose not to filter their wine because it favours ageing and helps in adding the flavour over time. To make the colour denser, you may expose it to some heat to let it reduce. Two cups of wine can be put on medium-low heat for 10-12 minutes. If you live in warmer climates, keep stirring the pot and keep it on flame for a lesser amount of time. Be careful of burning the wine in your pot.

Stencilling your design and applying wash
Make the design you want to paint with a pencil either by hand or a stencil. Go for a simple design first such as a flower vase or grapes. Wash the filled-in areas of the sketch with wine. do not forget to make the base by wetting the paper first. However, non-reduced wine having a lighter tone can do the trick without wetting the paper beforehand.

Let the wash dry
All the monochromes paintings need a wash as a base. The Wash technique is applying a coat of solvent centric paint strokes for making the background even. It also helps in visual representation to draw contrast against the darker hues of the same colour in monochrome.

Beware of getting stuck!
Wine has some amount of sweetness. It makes the paper sticky. Avoid resting your wrists at your pointing as it can crumple the paper and leave unwarranted smudges.

Filling in the darker hues
Fill the dark areas of the design to carve out the details. The size 10 brush can be used to do this. Be steady and make the pigment richer only after the last coat has dried. It takes a lot of patience and time to make wine painting.

Defining
As the name suggests, the final stage has come. Take the size 2 brush and outline the design to finer details with the most reduced and pigment heavy wine. outlining is the trickiest part as a wrong stroke can ruin the entire design. A water colour’s stroke can be diluted or be covered with another after it dries. But in wine painting, a wrong stroke will only make it darker.

Preserving
Wines are famous for one thing; they age. They get richer as time passes, but it will not hold good for a wine painting. Wine paintings are hard to preserve. Its colours will last less than watercolours. After letting it dry for few hours, immediately spray it with a good quality matt spray.

Now, we have walked you down through the ‘shenanigans’ of wine painting. The risk is now yours to take.