Over the past few weeks I have been busy with my watercolours. My life is very different this year; I’ve had to embrace new challenges but also some lovely new opportunities too. In January, I gave up my job to become a full time carer for my beautiful mum. It is definitely a challenge, but one that I’m more than happy to take on. But on the plus side my lovely mum has allowed me to set up a little make-shift studio in her conservatory, so I can snatch moments of time here and there to paint. Happy days!
Above is a semi abstract landscape created with ink on Baohong Masters’ Choice watercolour paper. I used Indian Ink – sepia, and Drawing Ink – blue. I’ve also been doing a series of colour experiments. Below is a couple of examples.
Both of the examples above were just me playing with colours, but I can see hints of abstract landscapes in both of them. The top one is just Indigo and the one underneath is Indigo and Undersea Green. Both these examples will go into my sketchbook, with notes of course.
I’ve also done some simple landscape practice…
Last of all, the really exciting news I wanted to share with you is that I have enrolled in Maria Wigge’s Diving Deeper Into Watercolor course. I’m really very excited about this. Maria has a website – https://www.mariawigge.com/ and you can also find her on Instagram – @mariawiggeart. Maria’s art is stunningly beautiful and I am eager to learn as much as I can from her about watercolour landscapes.
In the first part of the course we’re getting back to basics to begin with. We’ve been encouraged to properly get to know the colours we have in our palette. I already firmly believe that this is very important. I have 31 colours in my studio palette at the moment and I know them reasonably well already, but there’s always room for improvement, isn’t there? So I downloaded the sheets Maria provided and began filling them out…
The charts above are an extremely useful reference and I will keep these within easy reach of my desk, so I can refer to them when needed. I love seeing all my colours swatched out like this, it’s made me fall in love with them all over again! I have 11 sheets of colours above and it has taken me a number of hours to create them. But it is worth putting in the time to do this. Over time, I will do this also for the colours in my Secondary Palette too… which will take me many hours, but I will do it.
I will share more of my personal course work in the weeks/months ahead. But I will, of course, NOT share any direct content from the course. You can find out more about this course on Maria’s website. If you are interested in enrolling – do it straight away – enrolment is only open for a very limited time!
Finally one last photo…
That’s all for now, happy painting!
INDIGO BEACH ART 