Roses

This little painting of roses has taken me several days to do. It was an interesting exercise and learning curve. Roses are quite difficult to do and I feel such an amateur with water colour.

In the end I finally ran out patience with it which explaines the shortage of leaves and the background.

I will try again and soldier on.

3 Drawings

Another day, another painting/drawing. This is the first tiny artwork I made with my new travel water colour palette. It is a garden in front of an office block in Mary Street in Brisbane. It is painted on my moleskine sketchbook. It didn't take me long to go and buy a little watercolour sketchbook. Moleskines are great for pen and ink drawings but are not suited to watercolour.



One night I went to The Pancake Manor for dinner. It is situated in a lovely old building that was originally built as a church. I loved the ceiling and the heavy timber lights.

And finally ... every day when I have lunch at work I sit on the verandah of a three story building, looking out at the flat countryside that surrounds Roma. Usually I sit on one of these cane chairs and today was no different but I did draw another one of them.

Tulip

Thank you to everyone who has made such positive comments on my watercolour exercises. I really appreciate it.

Today I have painted a small tulip and here it is .

For someone who has been terrified of watercolours for the past six years since I began making art, I am pleasantly surprised at how much I am enjoying doing these little paintings. This tulip is on cold press water colour paper using my Windsor Newton travel set.

Someone asked me about the piece I posted yesterday called Nostalgia. It is 3D mounted on canvas. It is made from acrylic painted canvas and fabric, silk paper, machine made cording and beads.

Watercolour exercises

I went to Brisbane for work last week and enjoyed it very much. While there I bought a water colour travel set. It is a Windsor Newton set with little squares of colour that can be replaced when they are all used.

I had nothing to lose so I set about trying them out. Here is a Jet Star plane that I painted while waiting at the airport.

I went to the airport early so I would have plenty of time for fun activities like this.

Here is a view of one of the wings of the terminal that was opposite the plane. I sat drinking my bottle of water (it was early in the day) and painted the reflections in the windows.

They looked a lot better in reality than they do here in my painting!

Good practise.

By the time I got home I was pretty taken with this little palette of watercolours and I decided to pull out my old water colours that I have had for years but have rarely used. I just didn't have the skills to paint in water colour and all my attempts previously were disasters. After using this little travel palette I was reasonably happy with my attempts and decided to keep on working in this medium for a while.

As it is the time of the year for the Rugby League football finals I sat down to watch the Brisbane Broncos defeat the Bulldogs and painted these roses as an exercise. I think they wouled have been okay if I hadn't added those dark colours around them.

I had aimed for pretty delicate roses and need a lot of practice to attain the skills to paint them but at least they are recognisable.

And finally, I have been a great admirer of Karen's blog The Creative Journey for a long time now and harbour a secret desire to be able to paint beautiful gardens as well as Karen does. Her water colour gardens are so clean and fresh and bright. At the risk of self destruction I attempted one today - not quite up to Karen's standard but okay for a beginner.

I still harbour some hopes and will not give up. My attempts so far have given me hope and encourage me to continue practising.

Is it the process?

I've been a bad blogger. Life has been busy and I have continued to make art although I haven't posted any lately. To remedy this, here is some of the art I have made lately.

This is a painting, Storm Swirl, that took me a long time to complete. It is mixed media acrylic and I had a great time doing it but it was hard work. The colours were challenging for me to work in and in the course of painting it I learnt a lot of new ways to work.

It was fun and I do like the colours.

Once Storm Swirl was completed I wanted to do something completely different so I decided to pull out some fabrics and play. I painted this fabric with acrylic paint. I really loved the colour.

I find that sometimes when I am not sure what I want to do if I play for a while the actual process brings out some ideas for a piece. This is what happened with this piece.

After painting this fabric I knew that I wanted to combine it with some hand stitching on canvas.

And here it is. I have been working a lot with these two colours lately and am really enjoying them. This is a preliminary study for a major piece of work that I have in mind. It will be a long time coming but I have started by doing a series of smaller trial pieces.

Once again, acrylic and mixed media. It is called Nostalgia.

Doing this work has raised again the question of process and inspiration in my mind. Often they come hand in hand but when stuck for an idea I find that playing with a process will set me off and make the work happen every time.

Would love to hear your ideas on this.