Watercolour adventures

This week I explored watercolour a little…scared though I be of those soft swirly colours.

I thought I’d paint the same wren I painted a few months ago in acrylic, just to see some of the differences. First I drew an outline in pencil (something I didn’t do with the acrylic version).

wren pencil outline

 

Then I inked it in. It was weird not putting any ink shading in and I really had to hold myself back. Oooh, look an #inktober moment 😀 Another reason why I’m playing with watercolours at the moment.

wren outline

 

Then I painted it in watercolour. Quite scary because not only was I working in reverse (light to dark) to what I normally do with acrylic (dark to light), if I made a mistake I don’t think there would be much I could do about it. My inexperience screamed at me. Apologies for blurry photo. I need a new camera! ::wails::

Watercolour Wren

 

It was definitely an interesting exercise, and when I went back and compared it to the acrylic version, you could tell by the lack of opposing colours, that I wasn’t on firm ground with my materials.

 

Blue Fairy Wren

Watercolour Wren

One thing I found really interesting was that despite drawing the wren on an angled surface to prevent my perspective from skewing, I still managed to make exactly the same mistakes in his proportions that I made in the acrylic version, even though the watercolour version had a pencil sketch and the acrylic version was sketched fully in paint. I have a video of me painting the acrylic version – I didn’t video the watercolour version as I had no confidence whatsoever. If it doesn’t show up in your email of this post, you can find it here.

I also started a painting of a Bobtail squid (they are so adorable!) – the beginnings of which can be found on my Instagram, but I have yet to finish it, so I’ll leave that until next time…if I finish it.

Other happenings this week include accidentally joining Doodlewash, a watercolour painting community. I was hunting down examples of a fellow artist’s work for my last blog post and managed to join the community without realising it. However this turned out to be fortuitous as it inspired me to do the above. So I now have an account there 😀 Feel free to join me 😀

I’m thinking I will need to switch back to stamps for at least the next two weeks as I have the ‘Create your own Stamps’ workshop on October 29 to conduct and I need my head in the right space. So be prepared to see more stamp work here soon.

I also played with some beads for a short time last night (I was too tired to do anything else), and came up with a new design. Keep an eye out for these earring appearing on my shop 😀

elegant stars

 

Anyways, there is much yawning happening here, so I’ll shout out to Paint Party Friday which I will be sharing this with tomorrow (because when the PPF post goes live I’m at work and unable to post, so I do this the night before). Don’t forget to wander over there and check out some great artists.

Art always!

Best wishes,
Liz