Drawings

Two different drawings of the same figure. One loose and very quick pen drawing, and another a little bit more elaborated, but still very quick, pencil drawing. It is interesting how the medium changes the expression.

I am fighting against my own impatience when it comes to painting, though. I like the quick and spontanous way of expressing my self on the paper. But I still don't master the watercolours and the different paper qualities well enough to be able to control such a way of expression. So, I have to fight my own desire to paint in a quick and bold way as it very often ends up with a disaster! There is so much to learn about painting tecniques, different paper qualities, amount of water held in the paper, how the different pigments flow. Luckily, this summer I am going to attend to workshops! It is in Sweden, at Gerleborgsskolan www.gerlesborgsskolan.se . It will be 4 days in July and 5 days later in August. I am looking very much forward to it!

Woman with headscarf

 After struggling the last week with nothing working with the watercolours, I made this quick version of a woman with headscarf today; loose pen drawing and than more or less splashing paint on.

In the version below, I wet the paper first. I usually don`t do that, but I wanted to explore more soft settling of the pigments. I also tried to use more skinlike colours on the face. But for some reason, I find it more difficult than using the blue/purple shades I often use for faces.  Hm, I like the more spontanous one above better.

A new portrait appearing on the paper. No preliminary sketch, as I haven`t used a model nor a reference photo. That`s what I like the best - to see who will appear and what mood they are in!

Back to portraits

I was practicing on painting negative shapes - painting the bakground rather than the form itself - when this figure showed up.

Watercolour iris

Today I have been struggling with some wet-in-wet exercises - nothing worked out right. The exercises is, however, from a highly recommendable book, with lovely photos and good tips: "The essence of watercolour" by Hazel Soan.

At the end of the day gave up the wet-in-wet exercises and decided to just paint a flower, after inspiration from a nother very nice book, namely "Painting flowers with impact in watercolour" by Julie Collins.

So, then I finally managed to paint this iris.

Squirrel III

Here is a third version of a squirrel. I wanted to achieve a more loose style on this one.

Squirrel II

Here is another version of the squirrel. I started out with some pencil marks as I planned to make a more neat painting. But it didn`t last many minutes. I find it so much more fun to let the paint and water run and dry its own way!

This one is also painted in my sketch book, with only 160 g paper. What was fun to watch was how the paint was flowing and drying on this smooth surface. Normally I don`t paint on smooth paper.

Here is a close up photo of some lovely colour fusions on this smooth paper quality. I think I will try to paint another squirrel on high quality smooth paper to see what happens!