CREATING ART THE AMATEUR WAY

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. 

Just a bit of painting fun in my Real Stone Journal with Iuile and Coliro metallic paints, as well as Opera Pink watercolour.  Now let the Grok Imagine magic begin. This took a little time to conjure up but I am happy with the result. 

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 applie...

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

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. 

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.  I wanted to animate my tree painting using Grok Imagine.  After several attempts, trying to make it do as I wish, I think it turned out quite nicely within the limitations of 6 seconds. 

I decided to do an acrylic painting and I had been messing around with green, yellow, and blue paint and I hadn't been thinking of painting a cat. I am sure many artists, amateurs and professionals alike, have seen shapes in paint that resembles something, the way we see things in clouds, and have just gone with it.  This is what happened with the cat.  As I went along with the happy accident, I painted freely. I was surprised how much I liked the result.  It was painted on hardboard.  Although this was painted some time ago, today I decided to see what Grok Imagine could make of it. I tell you, I got some really weird results at first but with a view clear instructions managed to make Imagine create what I wanted.  Have a look. 

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.