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. 

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 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. 

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.