Or not, depending on my mood
These tiny red flowers grow on (and along!) anything they can find to climb up – in this case an old raspberry plant.
The little green leaves belong to the red flowers, and the big coloured textured leaves belong to the raspberry plant 🙂
Still practicing my water-colour painting, still playing about with exploring different ways of representing my world on paper, still not quite there yet in finding my own style… But at least I’m still having fun trying… 🙂
I never like feeling like a beginner at anything. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’m always emotionally uncomfortable at the feeling of not really knowing what I’m doing. There’s always an internal, infernal life-long feeling of not-good-enough-ness nagging away in the background, mocking my nascent efforts.
So here I am determinedly picking up water-colour painting in my later years, struggling to find my own way with what feels like such an unforgiving medium. It seems like there is simply nowhere to hide with water-colours, the promise of beautiful luminous transparency and fluidity that attracts me so strongly to it is also its biggest bug-bear for a control-freak like me.
I watch myriad tutorials on YouTube and try to replicate the wonderful loose light-touch techniques I see online, feeling initially motivated and inspired, but somewhere along the line it all regularly gets lost in translation. It feels to me like I’m painting with will-o-the-wisp water, chasing out-of-control colours careering across the paper, a bit like herding cats.
But still I persevere in the hope that one day I will stop feeling like a beginner so completely out of my depth. I’ll learn to love the way the water flows so unpredictably, stop fretting and fussing over it and worrying it to death, and learn to go with the flow. I’ll learn to lay the paint on the paper cleanly and clearly then leave it alone to do its own thing.
I’ll learn that less is more, let go of any real semblance of control and eagerly embrace whole-heartedly whatever creative outcome will be ❤
Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Beginner
Lavender and grasses painted loosely in watercolour 🙂
Until the other day the only place these prickly bright pink whorled flowers existed was in my imagination, but now they exist on paper as a water-colour painting, too! 🙂
I realised it’s been about a week since I posted anything on my blog – sorry about that, just not been in the mood… meanwhile I’m still painting bits and pieces here and there, still learning, still finding it therapeutic, so here are some water-colour poppies in a field just so I can post something… 🙂
My first attempt at negative painting – where you paint the darker background around the light-coloured main subject, leaving the white paper showing through, so creating a negative space. With water-colours you can’t really paint white on top of a darker colour, so my understanding is that this is the main way of achieving white in a flower. My focus right now is on playing around with exploring different texture effects, so I’ve mottled the background using grains of table salt dropped into a damp wash 🙂
A stylised watercolour rose for today’s Flower of the Day 🙂
Part of my playing with paint is trying different versions of the same design – so this is another three flower study from my imagination, similar to yesterday’s but with a slightly looser painting style… 🙂
Another poppies painting, loose and vibrant… I got a bit carried away so it’s a bit messy, but still very colourful! 🙂
Ruth Blogs Here 