CREATING ART THE AMATEUR WAY

Some time ago, in summer 2022, I decided to paint a picture of a metal goose that I have in my garden room.  It's quite large at about 60cm tall, comical, and cheerful, and I found myself wanting to paint something fun so I got out my Schmincke Horadam watercolours and set to work. I've never framed it or wanted to put it on my wall, but maybe one day it will be a nice gift for someone. It's not my best work by any means as I painted it just for the fun of it so I didn't labour over it, but I do like it. It makes me smile.  The goose, the bee, and the butterfly Metal garden ornament, a goose Since I have had access to Grok Imagine, I have become somewhat hooked on it.  It's fascinating, to me, to watch my paintings come to life and although the animations are superior to my work, I do get something out of it. I get, not least of all, inspiration for other paintings.  The copyright of animations from my original work remain mine.  

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...