Sparkly is always good

Ages ago, I bought a bottle of Winsor & Newton iridescent medium. Like so many of my art supplies, it lay around unused till last night I finally dug it out to have a play around.

I was using pans, so rather than mix it with the paint, I waited till the washes had dried and then brushed the iridescent medium over the top, before painting the outline.

Here's some autumn leaves. (No idea why I got the idea to paint autumn leaves in June, but anyway...) if you click on the image to make it bigger, you can kind of see the glittery bits.

I did some butterflies too, but they didn't come out very well due to me not being able to remember what butterflies looked like. And it didn't even occur to me to look for butterfly pictures on the internet! I think the iridescent medium works really well for butterfly wings so I'm going to do more of these, and hopefully the next lot might look a bit more like butterflies!

Oh and I'm having scanner trouble again. The colours of the butterflies are a lot more muted in real life, somehow the scanner has done the opposite to what it usually does and saturated everything rather than washing it out. The colours of the leaves are pretty much spot-on though.

100 posts! Let's celebrate with lots of cats!

Well I never thought I would have stuck with my blog long enough to make a hundred posts, but here I am! And I still love my little blog. It keeps me motivated to draw and paint and make stuff, and all your comments make me very happy and even more motivated, so hopefully there'll be another hundred posts to come.

(Click to make bigger.)

There is no better way to celebrate something than to draw lots and lots of different coloured cats. So here's lots of cats. (It was too big for my scanner so I had to stitch the pieces together in Photoshop, so if you can see any joins, just pretend you can't.) Faber Castell pen and watercolour.

My husband's masterpiece

This was painted by Richard, age 29.

In his defence, he is very very good at making complicated spreadsheets in Excel, and he is also a very good photographer, and he makes fantastic cups of tea, and the paints were not very good quality.

In case you can't tell, this is a seaside scene with cliffs. (Although that should be obvious, right?)

Love you, husband x

Very bright butterflies

When I first bought my watercolour set, I had no idea what I was looking for, so I bought the biggest Cotman set in Cass Art. There are half pans of about thirty colours, maybe more. Turns out I only ever use about ten of them regularly and some I had never used at all and in fact never even seen on paper, so I sat down last night to have a bit of a play around with these poor forgotten colours. Here's the result! I like painting wet into wet, because you never really know what you're going to end up with till it dries. I'm going to paint more of these, but next time I'll try and make them a bit neater round the edges!

I have really been neglecting my poor camera lately. I have a Nikon D80 and it's a great camera, but recently it's only been used for taking photos of stuff I've made or received in swaps. So I've signed up for Susannah Conway's Unravelling e-course, which starts on 4 May. I have exams at the end of May and always tend to fret and worry around exam time, so this will force me to take a bit of time out and stop fretting for long enough to take a few photos! I can't wait for this to start. I love Susannah's blog - if you haven't visited it, you should. She's a lovely and very talented lady who takes beautiful photographs.

Tree practice, again.

I wasted three pieces of watercolour paper tonight before I managed to paint something I didn't hate! I couldn't paint on the backs, as they were postcards and had some printing on the back, so I'll just use them for testing out colours. I didn't even get past the sky for one of them.

For this tree, I was only actually interested in painting the tree itself so didn't make much effort with the sky or foreground, but I don't think it turned out too badly. Hopefully this one looks less like a lollipop than my previous efforts!

We ordered my birthday present tonight - Jacksons have a 10% off sale on Maimeri paint until 12 May, so it made sense to order it now. But I'm not allowed it till my birthday which is 24 June so I'll just have to contain my excitement for another while :-)

Back to work tomorrow... sigh.

A carrot and a question.

I'm back on weightwatchers again, having put on a bit of weight over the past year. Eventually I would love to be able to go running again. Even if I was never able to do another marathon (I ran the Edinburgh marathon in May 2007 and loved it even though I got horribly injured) it would be nice just to run five miles maybe three or four times a week. But since I really just can't run at the moment, and even walking more than a couple of miles can be painful due to my stupid arthritic ankle, I am going to have to eat a lot more of these and a lot less cake.

:(

Here's a question for the watercolour experts. I am currently using Winsor & Newton Cotman paints. The plan is to replace them with artist quality paints very soon. But in the meantime I'm noticing a few things that mildly annoy me, and one of them is this:


See how in the palette the colours have separated? I had a mix of cadmium yellow pale, cadmium red and ultramarine, it was a slightly purplish grey, but you can see where I've left it alone for a minute and it's separated back out into its three components. Is this a common characteristic of watercolours? Or is it just because student quality paint contains more filler and less pigment? It bugs me a bit having to constantly keep swirling the brush around in washes to keep them mixed! If anyone can shed any light on this I would be very happy to hear your comments.

Trees are apparently hard to paint.

So I read somewhere that I can't remember. And I'm trying to convince myself that that's true, and it's not just me being inept.

Here are some trees I painted tonight. They are a bit too blobby to actually look like trees.

Another thing that is very hard is mixing greens. I used lemon yellow, cobalt blue, ultramarine, burnt umber and a bit of viridian for this little painting. I remember quite a lot of the colour mixing theory we did in my watercolour class at the start of the year, but actually putting it into practice is a different story. Still at least I had more luck with the scanner tonight, and I do like my little fence.

BADGERBADGERBADGERBADGER

MUSHROOM MUSHROOM

Does anyone else remember this travesty that did the rounds of the internet a few years ago? Ever since I painted this mushroom I've had this song stuck in my head and it's driving me nuts :( I'm currently listening to some really bad Spanish pop music on the radio in the hope that it'll get rid of the badgers. It's not working, and apparently every single Spanish pop song goes on about the soul. You touch my soul, I like your soul, your soul is beautiful...

Anyway, this mushroom was an exercise in colour mixing from my Alywn Crawshaw book. The colours used were alizarin crimson, yellow ochre and ultramarine. I overworked it a bit but I kind of like it anyway.

Watercolour failures

I did two more postcard-sized paintings last night. Both were exercises from a Frank Clarke book (in fact I think I've done one of them before, except bigger). I really don't like either of them. The trees look stupid and cartoonish. But all I wasted was two bits of watercolour paper and a bit of paint and a few hours of time, and it's all practice, isn't it?

I'm going to sit down with my Terry Harrison book tonight. He paints nice, more realistic trees. I'm just going to paint lots and lots of trees till they start to actually look like trees and not brown crayons with bits sticking out.

Oh and I'm still having major trouble scanning. The sky of the poppies picture is actually a weak ultramarine, but it looks almost white here. Hmmmm. I need to figure this out.

Back at the watercolour again.

I haven't done ANY watercolour painting since the class I took at the start of the year. This is terrible. And of course I've forgotten everything I learned so I'm back to the start again. I have lots of postcard-sized watercolour pads and thought it would be nice to paint some tiny landscapes on them. Unfortunately my scanner is not playing nice this morning at all and I've been completely unable to scan the boat picture so it looks even remotely like it does in real life (and I think it's crooked too). I'm going to have another go when I get back from work. I have to leave it for now because it's making me cross!

I enjoyed doing them anyway. I really must paint more.