How Many Colours Do You Need?

Like I wrote in my previous post, a change of the weather makes me change the art medium I am working (read doodling) with. So with some pretty good weather here in Holland, I took out my watercolour box and the tins with the watercolour crayons and watercolour pencils as well.

The watercolour box is wonderful, but the colours are so sensible and serious. And with the sun out, you really want sunny and different colours to work with. I got quickly bored with the lack of reds in the watercolour box, so I grabbed the crayons which needed a bit of sharpening first.
With a pencil sharpener I started with some fun red colours and when the shavings fell on my table, I realised that it would be a pity to just throw them away.

So I took out an empty plastic palette and collected the shavings. I added a few drops of water and let it mix together.
My intention was to let the 'paint' dry up in the pallette and use it like the watercolour box: just brush some water over it and you can paint away. This way, the colours of the crayons would be as easy to use as the watercolours in the box - which means: loads of different colours!

Always available, easy to store, easy to use. Just my kind of thing.

What I did learn was that you only have to use one single tiny drop. It took several days for the shavings to dry up in the pallete!

Watercolour crayons are a bit waxy. The medium that binds the pigment together is different than the one that is used in watercolour pans (arabic gum).This would explain the drying time in the palette. I did not notice a different drying time when actually painting on paper from this self made pallette.

Inspired by all these reds, pinks and purples I thought it would be nice to make tags with all the colours that I have to take with me to an art store to compare colours.
The funny part was, that when I was making these tags, that I discovered that I really had no need to go to the art store anymore now, I have way too many colours now...

What a pity! No art-store-visit-excuse anymore!
Well, maybe I can use that time to use all those colours instead!

Last Painting of the Course

This month we had our last lesson of the painting class I started in January. I managed to finish this painting of exotic fish. The photograph of this painting is a bit different from the reality - I took the shot in the garden on an overcast day - which should have worked, but did not...

I used acrylics on a canvas that was primed with gesso first. The source of inspiration were some poor photographs of fish in the Burger's Zoo (Arnhem).
I took those photographs despite knowing that the use of the high ISO and the camerashake caused by the long exposure time would be of low quality. What I did not know, was that some of them would turn out to be quite mysterious and eerie - often because of the movement of the fish.
The green, blue and yellow colours in the images also added to the atmosphere.
So these pictures became the inspiration for the painting. I started with the fish in the middle, and later added the second at the left hand - just peeking around the corner.

The course will start again in September. Hope though that I am still able to do some more painting this summer. But I will surely miss the help from the artist who teaches us!

Painting Classes

I gave up on New Year's resolutions a long, long time ago. But for 2009 I was serious about finally taking up painting again. Since planning time for myself is so difficult in our family, a painting class seemed the answer. This would force me to go out, away from all the other distractions at home.
The class I joined, was a group of women who had been painting together for years, but they made me feel very welcome right from the beginning. The teacher, Alexandra Steen, is also very well known around here.

Since it had been quite some time since I painted, I decided to take up an old painting that I never finished. That did not work out very well, there was a very good reason that I never finished that painting!
Still unsure about myself I thought that painting an abstract would be easy. Abstracts don't have to look like anything, don't they? Just throw some paint in strange shapes on a canvas and you have an abstract, right? Well, it seems that it is not the case, painting an interesting abstract is quite difficult actually!

So the next try was painting one of my own photographs in a different scene. A painting that I wanted to do for a long time and could not get out of my head.
It took 2 lessons and some encouragement of my art teacher to paint the little girl lost on an empty beach on the canvas.
At last a painting I felt good about! I am still looking for a good way to handle my brushstrokes and painting styles, so I am sure that I will experiment in the next few paintings. In a few years time I might paint a completely different version of this scene, but for now, I am quite happy about it.
In the meantime I started painted a fish, but am still working on that one!

Aboriginal inspired paintings

My sister is an expert at interior decorating on a budget. She has all the patience and persistence to find the perfect fabrics, affordable furniture, coordinate colours of fabrics and paint. And she even upholsters some of her own furniture as well!

So when the giraffe fabric finally gave up on her lounge chairs - thanks to her cat's claws - she was in the market for a new couch. Since she also sews her own curtains she felt it was time to invest in a major makeover of the living room.
Within a few weeks she had found everything she needed - except something for the wall. We were exchanging ideas over the phone about painting the wall. But then I got a call from her after she had visited an art gallery where she had seen Aboriginal paintings.

To make a long story short: I got three canvasses from her, a piece of the curtain fabric for the colours and some pictures of the paintings that she loved.
I decided not to copy the designs of the paintings, copying is just not my style, but to design different patterns. I felt that the Aboriginal paintings looked like simplified bird views of different landscapes and used that as a guide for the design.
Every coloured part of the painting has been lined with little dots - how I did that will remain a secret, well - more or less...
By using gesso, sand and loads of layering of paint, the pieces have a visible texture when you view it up close. This often makes people wonder whether it was made from leather or fabric.
Anyway, she loves her new art in the living room. And I am glad that I do not have to paint her walls, even though it would have been so much quicker...

Altered Book: Truth, Secrets and Lies

The new Round Robin has been organised on the Altered Book Europe Group on Yahoo. It took a while for me to get to work on it. I intended not to sign up for this Round Robin since I still have loads of work to do, untill I saw the first pictures being uploaded by group members...
The books they had altered were so beautiful that I wanted to join anyway! Luckily I had already a book prepared for altering and a list of themes I would like to work with.

The cover is very textured. It first started out as a painted cover with 3D letters glued to it. But I felt that it was not good enough - so I started glueing down all kinds of threads and yarns. Very messy work since the glue sticks more to the fingers than to the yarns and covers of course.
To keep everything together, I added pieces of tissuepaper to cover everything and added again some layers of paint.
As usual the picture does not bring out the textures that well...
I choose the theme Truth, Secrets and Lies. My intend was to write down little truths, secrets and lies down and cover them with layers of paint and collage - leaving bits to be readable and let the viewer decide what was a truth, a secret or a lie.
Guess I am not ready yet to do that - instead I started with some quotes about Lies and Truth.
The book will be send to Germany, and then travel through Europe to France, Danmark and the United Kingdom for other artists to work in.
When the book gets home, there will still be some pages left for me to write down my truths, secrets and little lies... For my eyes only... :-)