Lavender Field with Marmalade Sky

This is another "whim" from Joanne Sharpe's class.

Luscious Landscapes

We're painting landscapes now in Whims2.

Find Your Joy

I'm taking a free taster course from Louise Fletcher called Find Your Joy.  You can find out more about it here.

Louise works in acrylic, but there are a handful of us in this class working in watercolour.  In this first exercise, we taped off a large piece of paper and then painted ignoring the tape (i.e. as if it was one large painting).  We experimented with different mark making tools and limited ourselves to 30 minutes.  I found this exercise liberating, joyful, and lots of fun!

After I had applied a bit of paint I found myself working on the six individual squares, which turned out to be an optional second step.  I had so much fun that I may try this again and ATTEMPT to follow the instructions.

I have cut these apart and I'm undecided as to whether they are finished yet.  I'll put them away for awhile and look at them again later.

Pressed Flowers

These flowers were created by "pressing" our brushes onto the paper.  It isn't my favorite spread, but I was successful with spattering the drawing gum!

Big Bodacious Blooms and Flower Power

I'm learning some new tricks as well as having fun in "Whims in Watercolor 2".  With these big bodacious blooms we continued to use drawing gum to preserve our whites.  I'm getting better at using the silicon tools to draw with.

For both of these whims we mixed white watercolor with our transparent paints to create some gouache-like opaque colours.  In the whim above, we added them to our blooms after removing the drawing gum.  Below, you see just the more opaque paints.

My Town 2

This is another intuitive painting that I did during the "make art time" of our local Artist Trading Card swap.  It is in a small mixed media journal, hence the stray green mark over on the left side. 

Secret Blooms and Under Earth

These are two more whims from Joanne Sharpe's latest class.

Joanne was demonstrating Daniel Smith Primatek watercolours, which are ground from minerals, and have a bit of sparkle to them.  Her colours were, therefore, darker and more muted.  The metallic watercolours I used for these (inexpensive Laurentian paints) are much brighter, so the "under earth" theme didn't work as well.  I love it for the flowers, though!

These were both drawn with masking fluid before painting, using a silicone tool.