Watercolour Poppies and a Bumblebee

I often paint from photographs that I have taken so that I have the copyright of both painting and image, and this is no exception. I admit to being a complete amateur and it took me a while to get the courage to share my work online but I wanted to do it, not just to share my work with others but as a way of keeping an online journal. 

Watercolour Poppies and a Bumblebee

I am an admirer of the work of Shirley Trevena, an accomplished and internationally admired English watercolour artist who not only bends the rules but snaps them in two. By reading her books and watching her demonstrate her skills on her DVD videos, she has given me the confidence to do the same. It's liberating to forget about depth and proportion and perspective and, sacre bleu, Shirley likes to use black in her work. Black is taboo to some professional artists. it is one of those rules. I use black ink (in this case Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens) in my art as I have done in the below painting to emphasis the poppies. Who wrote those rules anyway!

As you can see from my above painting and the photograph below on which it is based, I don't allow the images to dictate how I will paint and there is little chance of anything I paint being a true representation anyway - I simply don't have the skill for that. In any case, I don't want to be worrying about detail, I want to splash paint on paper and have fun with colour and shape. 

I used Schmincke Horadam paint (my go-to paints although I have many brands) with Coliro metallic paint for the golden bits. Have you ever seen such a fat bumblebee in all your life? 

Papaver nudicaule 'Garden Gnome' Iceland Poppy

I have a lot of paints in tubes but sometimes it is just easier to use pans. This below is my first serious set of watercolours in a box. I shifted the contents around, squeezing in many more colours. You can tell I am a bit obsessed about it. I find pans less wasteful and it is so nice to just dip in and out of various colours without having to search through a load of tubes. I created colour charts which tell me the properties of the particular colour, whether transparent, opaque, staining, lightfast, and so on. 

Schminke Horadam watercolour box set

Finally, I want to mention that I don't pay for framing. Instead, I choose to either cut my own mats and buy glass, backing board, and custom-made frame separately or, as in this case, buy a complete unwanted frame at a charity shop. I cut my mats with a Logan 301 mat cutter.