Friday 15 January 2016

Watercolour playtime

Well my poor blog has been so neglected and at last I've had time to have a little play. I have other workshop things to be shown but I can't put them up until a little later.

These little postcards are the experiments of playing with brushos, bisters that my sister bought me for Christmas, watercolours and stamps.


The background was started first using distress inks before stamping this gorgeous bee by Wendy Vecchi which was stamped twice, once with sandstone brusho and again over the top with black archival which helped to get me a watercolour shadow. Water was used to be;each out some of the colour in the wings and watercolours painted in. Bisters were add and spritzed over the background and the hexagons stamped (also Wendy's) to finish it off.


The leaf gave me quite a bit of a headache. It's one of Tim's blueprint stamps which I masked and stamped over with another of Tim's old stamps to create a background, but it was far too busy and the leaf was completely lost. But I added brushos and bisters and spritzed to get the watercolour background, then using water bleached some of it out around the leaf trying to make it come to the front and show up more. It didn't!! After a while I took my watercolours and painted white around the edges and let it dry, this was beginning to look better and I repeated the process about 3 times. Now the leaf pops out more and the background looks quite misty and ethereal. Yep I am quite happy with that.


This last one is one of Tim's landscape stamps and you can guess where (even if the main buildings are all in the wrong place lol). Again I used the brushos and bisters to get the watery looking background and used bleach spray to create the clouds and to take out some colour from the buildings, painting them back in using the powders. I used just a little grey on the clouds.

Although I studied three years of oil painting at college I am not a watercolour artist, but the powders help create those lovely indistinct backgrounds and can be manipulated and changed. I just enjoy the processes which is the main thing.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx