Koi Carp and lily pads in a journal

I am trying so hard to get back into painting and instead of just relaxing and splashing about, I keep trying to do something worthy of hanging on a wall which is rather ridiculous seeing as how I am painting in a journal! I'm really pleased with the Strathmore Mixed Media journal; it does take watercolour very well and although the painting is rather overworked, I still think it looks pretty. 

The inside cover of the Strathmore journal looked a little bare so, although it is not watercolour quality paper on the inside cover, I decided to try and connect it to the Koi Carp painting. It was more of a doodle than a plan but I think it works, kinda. Imagine paying $1.8 million dollars for a fish. 

Dianthus in watercolour and ink

It's been quite a while since I felt like painting and, as a lot of artists know, once you break off it can be so hard to get back into it. I have been distracted by an out-of-control garden and numerous other things. I decided to paint small and start a journal showing my garden from the very start of what was a blank canvass of unkempt grass right up until present. That's the idea anyway. I have a lot of photographs since 2009 so I won't be stuck for ideas and it is often the coming up with an idea that gives artists the equivalent of writer's block. 

I would like to add that the Strathmore Mixed Media journal is really really good with watercolours. I didn't expect it to be but it is. I used Mijello Mission Gold paint, some Coliro green metallic, outlined with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist pen, and then splashed around a bit with pink because it was SO boring without. 

REPAIRING AND DECORATING A TERRACOTTA LONG TOM

It has been a while since I did any watercolour painting but I did recently repair a very badly damaged terracotta Long Tom pot. They are relatively expensive to buy and it was fun trying to save it. Some of the pieces were missing from the pot and I have no idea where they disappeared to, so I shoved together some bits of pot and filler, bit by bit building it up, letting it dry, adding some more. It took a while!  Then I sanded it smoother (I didn't fuss), lacquered the inside to stop it being so porous, painted the outside with chalk paint, and stuck transfers on it. Then I added two coats of lacquer and that was that. 

It now has a Tumbling Tom tomato plant in it which disguises the botch job. 😄

COMPLEMENTARY PAGES IN A JOURNAL

I like, when the pages of my journals are open, for the 'artwork' to be complementary in some way to form a cohesive whole, so I watercolour-doodled an abstract, letting the Mijello Mission Gold paint and colours do as they will, then outlined shapes with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist pen. 

How it looks when the pages are open.

EASY WATERCOLOUR VASE AND FLOWERS WITH FOUR COLOURS

I have not been in the mood for anything too complicated or laborious in watercolours so I've been, more or less, doodling in a journal. The transparent flowers are painted with Mijello Mission Gold watercolours 'Bright Opera' and 'Bright Violet'. The vases and foliage were painted with Mijello Mission Gold 'Leaf Green' and 'Viridian'. The ink outlining was with a Faber Castell Pitt Art Pen 0.1.

I just roughly painted petal shapes in very diluted Bright Opera and then when dry overlapped the petals with diluted Bright Violet. Sometimes I didn't even bother to let the bottom petals dry properly. 

The vase was trial and error. I wasn't bothered about shape perfection any more than I was with the flowers, but I wanted depth of colour and interest. I painted a very dark tonal value of Viridian and when it was partially dry dropped small amounts of clear water into it with the tip of my clean brush, creating watercolour blooms. 

The behaviour of water fascinates me, how it will remain within the boundaries of wet paper, avoiding dry, and how applying clean water will push pigmented water out of the way. 

Doodling on a colourful abstract watercolour

While I find inspiration for a larger painting for my living room wall, I am resorting to using my journals. I have some gloriously colourful sheer fabric which I bought years ago just because it is gloriously colourful, and it was the inspiration for this painting. I put loads of Mijello Mission Gold paint on the paper with a lot of water and let it do it's thing. Then I doodled around shapes with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist fineliner. The journal is by the Hand-Book Journal company. 

Colourful and easy watercolour landscape

I am trying to paint without stress, without worrying whether I've done a great job or not, playing with paint, and so I have an orange sky, pink mountain range, turquoise hillside, a kind of foggy bit, green fields, and trees of various shapes. It's in my Hand-Book journal. It was fun and that is what amateur painting should be, isn't it? Therapy in these stressful times. 

The painting was done with various bits of leftover paint in palettes, Mijello Mission Gold and Daniel Smith custom mixed. 

Zen stacked pebbles in watercolour

This was done for a bit of fun and I quite liked it considering I had never painted a Zen stack of pebbles before, then I went and wrecked it. Fortunately I'd taken a photo pre accident.  You see, thing is, I accidentally, and without realising it, got the cuff on my woolly cardigan slightly wet while washing dishes and as I was adjusting the painting (cannot remember exactly what I was doing now) I noted I was smearing my painting with water. I kid you not. 

Note to self: watch out for wet cuffs. 

I think I used Schmincke Horadam for this one with the background of Daniel Smith's 'Buff Titanium' (a favourite colour of mine) . 

Getting back into watercolour painting after a break

I hear this so very often that, when someone breaks off painting for a length of time, they find it difficult to get back into it. I find that too and also frame of mind has a great impact. The thing to do, as they say, is do it without pressure. So here are my attempts without pressure. They are in a Handbook-Journal and when it is closed you cannot see them - which is a good thing in this case, I think. 🤣

I had various colours of paint which were already in palettes so I used those. Waste not want not. 

Watercolour mushrooms painted just for the fun of it. Those spikey things are from an actual photograph of moss spores that I took and find them extremely beautiful. The watercolours ones are painted with a lot of artistic licence and not a lot of patience. 

Quick watercolour painting of a row of trees. 

Watercolour of polar bear swimming

My home now looks like an art gallery, but do I care? Everywhere there are paintings of mine and I will sit and look at them and think how, although I am still very much an amateur, they please me. I had my painting of baby harp seals on the wall and wanted a painting to complement it, so I painted this polar bear swimming. 

Fortunately, and the good thing about this blog for me, is that I had noted what brand and colour of paints I used when painting the seals; it is Schmincke Horadam supergranulating 'Glacier Turquoise', 'Deep Sea Indigo', and ivory black for the eyes, nose, and shading. The painting surface is Arches 300lb cold press.  

Polar bear swimming

Baby harp seals

Decorating a china vase with chalk paint and leaves of metallic gold colour

A while ago I covered a pair of flowery china vases with a rough texture Ronseal 'smooth finish filla' and then painted them with Annie Sloan 'Graphite' chalk paint.  Yesterday, I decided to apply Annie Sloan gold leaf to them. I daubed the vases with 'Gold Size' and when that dried I applied the gold leaf (they are brass actually) onto the size. I protected them with clear wax. I rather like the result. 

Disaster befell me a week or so ago when the plastic tap-in wall hooks which held up all my art frames began to crash spontaneously to the floor. They had been in place for a year or two and suddenly the hook parts began to snap off!  I had to take all my paintings down, to be safe, and rethink the situation. Certainly I will not be using those wall hooks again, at least not for frames with glass in them! 

While they were down, I decided to paint a lot of the frames black. That brought about the decision to decorate the vases black and gold. See? 😐

Watercolour Red Capped Crane

I painted this Red Capped Crane a while ago using Schmincke Horadam watercolours. I decided yesterday that I wanted it to form a group of paintings on my wall, all with a similar oriental theme so today I touched it up a little, making the sun a bit redder, adding flag iris and a couple of koi carp for the bird to focus on. I then coloured the paintings frame with Annie Sloan 'Graphite' to match the frames for the other two paintings, shown below. 

Watercolour paintings with oriental theme 

Faux granite urn

As we all know, art isn't just applying watercolour, oil, or acrylic to a canvas. A couple of years ago I got chalk-paint madness and I decorated every single piece of furniture in my home with it, as well as ornaments and lamps. I even decorated garden pots with it.

This is a Mexican clay urn which developed a huge crack in it. Reluctantly, I made the decision to paint it and I'm glad I did. 

First I sealed the crack in the urn with polyfilla and added a layer on the base so that it was stable when stood upright and no longer supported by the original stand. When that had set I covered the entire pot with Annie Sloan 'Old White'.  While still wet, I took a small sea sponge and dunked it alternately in Annie Sloan 'Graphite' and Hemway 'Pastel Blue' and kept on dabbing the white with the dark grey and blue until I got the desired effect. When finished and the chalk paint was dry, I went over it with a protective layer of Annie Sloan 'Clear Wax' and that was that. 

I stuck some artificial flowers (peonies, eucalyptus/rose garland) that I bought online and arranged them so they cascaded.  

The Year of the Dragon - Kung Hei Fat Choi

This is actually a work in progress and it has been on hold for a long time while I forget it about it and then I remember and wonder if I should leave it, add to it, and so on.  I thought it was time to bring it into the light on this Chinese New Year of the Dragon. It has been painted on almost a full sheet of heavyweight watercolour paper and was originally intended to be a diptych. This might just be the year I finish it. 

Watercolour autumn leaves with Sennelier

This is a painting of autumn leaves using Sennelier paint on white Arches cold press paper, 140lb. The funniest thing, I can't quite remember how I did it. I think I drew a lot of leaf shapes, painted them vibrantly using two colours on each, then between them in black. Then, to give depth, I used transparent paint for leaf shapes over some of the black areas so that the black would show through. The detail and outlining of the leaves would be done by pen. Finally, a splash of various coloured paint over the entire painting. 

Neurographic doodle with green, yellow, and blue Polychromos pencils

Another neurographic doodle using green Polychromos pencils and a fine Faber-Castell Pitt Artist pen.  This type of art is so easy and stress free. You could do it while watching TV!

On the opposite page I have glued in a mulberry paper.  I plan to paint on the mulberry paper at some point as I have done before... Dragon painting on mulberry paper. 

Two shoes painted with metallic paint

Just a bit of painting fun in my Real Stone Journal with Iuile and Coliro metallic paints, as well as Opera Pink watercolour. 

Spider on web in watercolour and metallics

This was a steep learning curve for me. I used a macro photograph of a spider on its web, which I took some years ago, for the reference photo. The web was actually on a large fern in my garden and on it are the spider, raindrops, and the golden sporangia from the fern itself which look like jewels in the photograph. 

Unfortunately, I thought the best idea would be to create the raindrops by using masking fluid and then painting the background but that was a seriously bad idea. I found, once I had painted the background, that the areas protected by the masking fluid weren't round enough. I decided to use Coliro metallic 'Silver' to cover where the masking fluid had been and it still looked bad. I wanted to make the water droplets glitter. I also wanted the web to glitter as well so I used a 'Uni-ball Signo UM-120SP Gold Glitter gel ink Rollerball pen - at least that worked out! 

Sorry to say that the glitter does not show in the iPhone 🙄photo. 

In desperation, I applied black ink on parts of the drops to try and make them look like drops (because my eyesight isn't good enough for me to try and do it with watercolour) and on and on it went. I gave up in the end. The spider was easy though. 😄

The painting was done in my Real Stone Journal using Roman Szmal watercolours as well as Faber Castell Pitt Artist pen. The sporangium was a mishmash of watercolours. 

My macro photograph which I used for reference. My painting does not do it justice. 😔

Metallic watercolour painting of icicles and frost on a window

It's freezing in the north of England today, with a scattering of snow. I decided to paint this picture of watercolour icicles and frost on a window, using Coliro metallic silvers (Stardust and Silver) on black Stonehenge journal paper. As always, the metallics were tricky to control but I'm not entirely unhappy with the result. It looks a lot better in the Stonehenge pad than it does onscreen.

I took the photograph of the icicles, which were hanging outside my kitchen window, a few years ago and decided to use them as a reference and do the best I could with  the rest. 

Reference photo, taken by me, 2015

Pencil drawing of glass decanters

This is a drawing of glass decanters that I designed while doing an interior design course some time ago. I wish I had the all actual decanters; I have the middle one. I remember I had so much fun drawing them. 

Watercolour tree using Roman Szmal paint

I've been doing a lot of writing lately and am afraid to break off in case I go back into a writer's block, but I have been missing the creativity of using colourful paint. While the frustration of writing often increases my stress levels, painting generally (not always) depletes them. In desperation, I painted a quick painting of a little tree inspired by a YouTube tutorial by Anastasia Mily using Roman Szmal paint. My version took about 15 minutes in my 8x8 inch Handbook Journal for watercolours (it is not cotton).

A link to Anastasia Mily's YouTube channel has been created in my External Links page. 

Blue acrylic cat

I decided to do an acrylic painting and a cat came right out of the blue. It's my Ragdoll cat, Alfie, although he is actually cream with a dark brown face. It's artistic licence. 😆

The cat was painted freely, very freely, and rather carelessly. I was surprised how much I liked the result. I was in an art group at the time (not a class) and I'd never painted anything that I could recall ever doing before with acrylic, so I went at it. Sometimes accidents with art are happy ones. 

It was painted on hardboard. I still have it tucked away somewhere. I ought to dig it out. 

Watercolour and pen doodles of a Wildflower field

Sometimes isn't it nice to just have fun when painting without trying to create some masterpiece? These are a couple of watercolour doodles of wildflowers in a field. Anyway, that was impression of what they looked like while I was doing them. 

I did them on opposite pages in my Handbook Journal. A Faber-Castell Pitt Artist pen was used for the black lines. 

Solar System in watercolour

I used a whole sheet of Arches cold press 300lb watercolour paper for this interpretation of the solar system. I used reference photos from the NASA website which are public domain. It is such a large painting and I have such limited space that eventually I abandoned it but I guess it is done enough that I could call it finished. Or maybe I'll tweak it one day. 

The painting in the early stages...

The paint used was Schmincke Horadam from my self-customised box set...

Watercolour painting of baby harp seals diving under polar ice

Once again I dove into unknown territory when I decided to paint seals diving. I chose baby harp seals for my subject as they have beautiful white fur when very young. If they look rather fat and round it is because they are, in real life, so cute! Doing a bit of research when looking for ideas for bubbles, I discovered that seals breathe out before they dive (to reduce buoyancy) and that enough oxygen is stored in their blood for them to be under water for quite some time. I wanted bubbles so I did some coming from the tail as I had seen in seal-diving videos where air was brought down into the water when they dive. Not sure I got the bubbles right but anyway...I used white gouache for them and all the other whites are unpainted paper (Arches cold press 300lb). 

I chose to use Schmincke supergranulating blues for the water, from various Galaxy and Glacier ranges, sometimes mixing two together until I got what I wanted. It was quite difficult thing for me to paint (isn't everything! 🤣) as I think I have only ever done two undersea paintings before, of a turtle and a coral reef. 

I didn't use a single reference photo for the seals but used a medley of several photos and video images. 

Emperor penguins and chick in mixed media

Another one that threw me into the deep end. I thought it would be relatively easy but I struggled with the sharp edges due to the texture of the paper (Arches cold press 300lb). I ended up edging with a Caran d'Ache 'Luminance' black pencil in places. Then there was the problem of the colour of the paper which is a light cream and far from snowy, so I brought out the dear old white gouache life saver. The sky was Schmincke Horadam supergranulating 'Glacier Blue' which I actually used thinly over the entire background then later daubed white gouache over to try and achieve a snowy effect. The dark paint used was Winsor and Newton's 'Payne's Grey' and Mijello Mission Gold's 'Ivory Black'.  

I can see all the flaws in the painting, they glare out at my critical self, but I had to stop before I ruined it altogether! I think the hardest thing to paint was the Emperor penguin chick. I'm still unhappy with it. I'm not well versed with painting white objects upon white and I hated the idea of having to define the chick's face using grey. They are fat little things with grey coats but their faces are white surrounded by black. 

One thing you might note is that the adult Emperor penguins don't have eyes in the painting. That's not a mistake. Their eyes are so dark they are almost black (no doubt to protect them against the glare of the sun on snow) and do not often show up in photos. 

I didn't use a single reference photo for this but several; it is a compilation of various copyright free photos put together. At first I was going to paint an egg between the two adult birds but then decided upon a chick looking upward, demanding to be fed. The things those adult penguins go through to feed their chicks, it is hardly surprising they only have one at a time. 

Fox and Snowdrop in watercolour / mixed media

I thought I would try a winter scene, something I don't think I have ever done, and for the subject I chose a fox looking at a snowdrop poking its head above the snow. Although I started off with it being total watercolour, it didn't quite end that way. 

I used Arches 300lb cold press for this so I could use plenty of water for the sky without the paper buckling. The sky was Schmincke Horadam Supergranulated 'Galaxy Black'. The red of the fox was Daniel Smith's Quinacridone Gold and Quinacridone Deep Gold. For the snow I used Schmincke Horadam white gouache. The darker browns were a mix of Schmincke Horadam orange and browns until I was reasonably happy. To create the snow on the fox's body I used a Jackson's 'Silverline' Series 982 3/4 comb brush. Around the fox's eye and for the snowdrop green I used a Caran d'Ache 'Luminance' pencil and for the flower petals I used a Coliro metallic 'Sterling Silver' so it would pop. 

Easy watercolour using templates

I painted this last summer. Sometimes, often, usually actually, I get a mental block of what I want to paint next and spend so long mulling about it that I could have painted something during that time. This is a watercolour I made using plastic templates, just for the fun of it. I like most of it except for that top right yellow and black thing that looks like a windsock! 😆

Painting over a watercolour disaster with watercolour

A couple of weeks ago I painted a total disaster in my Strathmore watercolour journal and I had a choice of ignoring it, cutting the page out, or trying to fix it. 

I couldn't possibly ignore it, it would have bugged me forever. I didn't want to cut the page out without at least trying to remedy it. The original artwork itself was unfixable but I applied a lot of water and lifted as much paint out of the paper as I could. Bear in mind that this journal is not cotton and it does not play nicely!  I was left with very pale colour, a couple of fine unremovable lines, some stubborn gray sections right at the bottom, and a piece torn out of the paper where the masking tape ripped the top surface off. 

I thought about what was left on the paper and decided it had to be a seascape so I went at it with Holbein watercolours and did the best I could. The palm tree could be better (it hides some horrors!) but there is a point when you just know you have to leave it. It all could be better but at least it doesn't offend my eye like the previous one did. This one can stay put. 😀

Dragon painting with metallics on mulberry paper

I painted this dragon quite a few years ago now. It's a small, experimental, painting using Coliro metallic paints on a good quality mulberry paper which I had glued around the edges to good quality cold press paper. I used Pritt Stick glue for that. I wanted to know if I could paint on the mulberry paper and it was tricky, the mulberry paper losing strength with the liquid metallics but it was supported to a great degree by the backing. I had to be careful but it was so effective. The only thing I don't like about it are the flames coming out of the dragon's mouth. I should have done a single column of fire fanning out like it would from a flame-thrower.

The mulberry paper I bought online came in a package of many coloured textured sheets. I was looking for a demo of someone painting mulberry paper to share with you and I came up with a video on the YouTube channel: 'Oriental Art Supply'. I note the artist has affixed her mulberry paper to a card backing. I've put a link to the video on the External Links page.