Thursday, July 28, 2011

Going With the Flow

More watercolour painting for me this week, as I picked up one of my library books on watercolour painting and gave one of the exercises a go. It turned out much better than I expected. I really enjoyed doing the background and loved the flow and ease of watercolours. It is by no means an easy medium but I like the smoothness of it and the versatility. That actually surprised me how versatile it was…can’t wait to try a few more exercises.

brushes 

As much as I love really ‘polished’ photos, when it comes to art and blogging I love to be able to share the ‘realness’ of creative expression- note the paper towel and the Shrek like green water on the right. This was step 1, to lightly sketch the flowers and then do the wash for the background.

step 1

Step 2

step 2

Once the paper was dry I could go to step 3 which was to paint in the stems and petals, adding a soft grey over the white to get the shading. This was the final product.

final

This is always the sign of a good day.

A good day

I hope you have all had a great week and have been able to take the time to do something creative. Check out what other people have been doing at Our Creative Spaces.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

My Creative Space- Water Colour Painting

I have been incredibly lax this year with blogging and it is not because I haven’t been doing anything creative, I guess I just lost my blogging groove. I also have the admit I was getting highly frustrated with my compact camera and not being able to illustrate this blog as I would have liked. So I am back now armed and dangerous with the new Canon 600D digital SLR. It was an absolute indulgence but I have been wanting an SLR for ages. I spent many happy and creative years with my Nikon film SLR and have deeply missed the creative potential of SLR photography. 

So to kick my ‘new and improved’ blog off, I wanted to share my creative space with you this week. This week I have delved into the art of water colour painting. Over the weekend I met up with a bunch of wonderfully creative and inspiring women to paint and do other ‘artsy’ things. I cut out some pictures of plants from some magazines and settled on a gorgeous succulent with wonderful greens, pinks and reds to paint. 

gorgeous colours    2 succulent art    

It was a wonderful day and it inspired me to go to my local library and borrow some books that have some step-by-step beginners exercises, which should be great.

Today I was also fortunate enough to spend the day with a friend who is teaching me how to do mosaics. She is a very talented artist and I really love the mosaics she has done so far. Photos to come on this project.

I hope you have all had a wonderfully creative week.