CREATING ART THE AMATEUR WAY

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

Once again, I painted another member of the large cat family, this time a leopard and I think it was harder than both the tiger and the lion. I discovered that you can actually mix Coliro metallic colours but I was out of my depth. What progress can be made in our attempt to achieve perfection—even if that goal will always be out of reach—if we only paint the easy stuff?  One mistake I made was trying to draw the leopard's whiskers using wax crayon. The paper's texture resulted in broken lines and all too late I discovered that the ideal tool for the job was a Sakura Gelly Roll pen, size 10.  I'm not joking when I say that the painting looks far better in the journal than it does on screen where all the flaws shout out loud.  I need to thank IanZA on Pixabay for the copyright free use of his reference image and I'll put a link to it in my External Links page . Grok Imagine has once again worked its magic on my modest painting.

This was a devil to do and I got myself tied in knots. Even so, it looks better in the journal than on the photograph. The camera lens cannot quite catch the luminescence of the paint and the silver hair of the lion looks bluish in the photo.  If I were to do it all again, I'd do it differently with more dragging effect. I didn't decide to drag the side of my brush across the paper until I had done much of it and I think that technique has given the painting an interesting effect. I used a fan brush to do the lion's mane but kept getting blobs. When I swept the brush first over a scrap piece of paper to stop that, then there wasn't enough paint to be effective on the painting and I ended up going back to a plain old brush. sigh. Still, it was a learning curve and, to a degree, I enjoyed the challenge.  Speaking of plain old brushes. Metallics can be rough on expensive watercolour brushes so I used brushes from a set of 50 which I bought on Amazon. They come in handy for...

Once more I dove into the deep end with this painting. I traced the tiger's face using an online 'free' photo and I did it with pencil because I knew that the graphite would shine on the black paper surface but I made a big mistake. In my enthusiasm and desire to ensure the tracing showed up I pressed too hard and, instead of carefully going around the traced lines, I went at it like a mad woman. The result was that the pencil transferred to the black paper alright but I ended up with a mass of shallow grooves in the paper. I could hardly see which was what. Anyway, I persevered and eventually gave up with the tracing and grooves and made my own way by guesswork and eyeballing.  Another issue which I knew would happen was the limitation of the colours of metallic watercolours that I have and I wasn't about to order a load more.  You can't shade and glaze like you can with watercolours, or at least I can't, because metallic paint lifts off with the touch of a wet...

Had a bit of fun this afternoon trying out metallic paints on Stonehenge 600gsm paper. I've used Coliro a few times but Iuile metallics are recent discoveries. None of the paints used are colour-shifting. The doves' outlines were created using a stencil by Annie Sloan as were some of the trees and the houses, the stars were from another stencil set I have, and the moon is by yours truly. One of the positive things about metallics is that you can lift them right off the paper easily enough (that can also be a negative thing!) but also, when dry you can paint over them if you use some care. The colours can be blended, again with care. The only Iuile paints I used were Forest and Lime from the Shimmer range.  The picture loses some of its razzle dazzle in the photograph because, I suppose, the only way to truly show it off would be in a video with the painting tilted back and forth.