Whimsical things

Still painting along with Diane, stranger things now, blobs of watercolour and pen lines. She says you can make bookmarks and greeting cards, which I don't want to do, so now I have paintings of strange sheep.

Cats on a branch. The pen lines aren't meant to be the same as the paint lines, it's intentional. And artistic. The sheep are on the cheaper (but still 100% cotton) paper that I don't really like, it's too slippery. I found that Officeworks has 100% cotton paper in its house brand which is also cheap (well, cheaper than Arches, so not cheap at all) and better than the slippery paper. I quite like trialling paper but there's a wild variation in quality, even with the same ingredients. 

Cats covered in mystical symbols. This is why I'm buying more marker pens, including gold ones and white ones. 

Blobby birds. Diane does a lot of birds, and she's very good at them, but I haven't quite got the shape and the shade right. There are places on birds that are meant to be darker than others and I'm not exactly nailing it. But they look like birds, and not giraffes, so we're halfway there. 

Diane Antone

So I have found a watercolour artist who does Youtube videos and has a website, and does almost daily painting demonstrations that you can paint along with .. and she is really resonating with me! The emphasis is on loose things that are fun to do. I like that. She is clearly talented and very experienced, and I am finding the approach and attitude extremely refreshing. Not to mention the dogs, chickens, cats and sheep that occasionally wander into the videos.

This was the first one I did, when I was dissatisfied with some flowers, so did about five Youtube videos in a row of different ways of painting watercolour flowers. Most of them were not so great, but I did love this, it appeals to me. 

Next we did a dragonfly. Diane likes to use mixed media, which I also like :) A bit of pencil or marker pen or watercolour pencil can pep things up no end. And put some splatter over it all, why not.

And some not-found-in-nature birds. 

Another vase of flowers. None of these are particularly good but I feel like they are using all the potential of watercolour, in a way that I hadn't been lately. I spend about an hour and a half doing one of these paintings and it makes me happy! 

Sick

Good thing I did yesterday's post a day early to go up automatically - on Wednesday I was totally out for the count with another nasty migraine. I haven't had one for ages now that I'm getting much better at avoiding triggers - onions mostly, but also some chocolate, some chemicals and possibly too much sugar - but something set me off and I had a bad one. Ended up taking codeine which I don't like doing but it is remarkably effective at putting me to sleep! And then like a zombie for the next 24 hours, but that's better than vomiting and pain. I did have a little snooze buddy though. Very helpful.

Thursday was very quiet - a public holiday for the queen. I'm not sure what everyone was meant to do, I went for a walk to get some fresh air and then lay down again :) There was a minute's silence at one point but not sure when and they had to cancel the flypast because the weather was quite bad. So now back at work for a day and then a weekend again. I am quite confused by which day it is, and still a bit dopey, so yeah, all good.

Abstract art

Jenny from the good classes has a Pinterest page where she puts various boards of things that might interest students - including one that is 'ideas for complete beginners' - and it is full of excellent things to inspire. Or copy, as the case may be. One of the paintings there that quite intrigued me was by Shell Rummel, who is a Californian artist/designer that does abstract things. I do not know about abstract things so I googled, then straight copied a few of her works to see what was involved.

Tonal colours, some unexpected bits, outlined in fine liner pen. Much more complicated than it looks originally, and somehow manages to suggest something landscape-like. Kind of.

This is a tree I copied where I experimented with different types of outlining, which is why it looks a bit scrappy. I tried charcoal pencil, felt tip pens, coloured pencils, watercolour pencils, thicker and thinner marker pens. Anything coloured that isn't exactly the right tone feels a bit rough with this type of painting. It either has to be black or the perfect colour, which is hard with a 12 pack of textas from Officeworks. 

I did a couple of other copies that weren't particularly successful, and then went off-books and invented my own landscape. Not 100% what I was after, the colours are a bit crude and don't fit together properly. But all of it was very fun to do, and not able to be rushed, so it took quite a long time. Meditative, which is nice. I don't think I'm fully committed to abstract work, but I'm pleased I took a little detour.

Paddling in water

Much more satisfying to dip your toes into water than try and capture it in Winsor & Newton Prussian Blue. Although I think the creek would need quite a lot of Aureolin and possibly some Cobalt. Isn't it lovely? And the sand was very white on the weekend.

My husband came down with me which was an unusual bonus - I didn't sew but read a book, ate ice cream and watched the footy finals. An absolute one point nail biter for one of the AFL semi finals but the NRL was a washout for the Canberra team. I pay absolutely no attention to any football during the season but I can happily watch a final if there is alcohol and nothing else to do. 

Sunday was a big warm windy sky. Rain on the way, which hit by the time we got home. Slightly too much wind for swimming, but I possibly could have, if I dodged between the fisherfolk. No, they weren't catching anything. It was the middle of the afternoon and there's not that much of a gutter. 

We walked back around to the old house where we used to rent before we bought our place - they've put on a new roof, a deck at the front and re-painted it, which is a bit shocking after twenty years of complete neglect! But it doesn't look they re-stumped, so still a bouncy floor and a suspicious soft spot near the bathroom. Good times.

Painting water

In the good classes we have been learning about painting water. It is quite difficult. The teacher does a few strokes and a splotch and bam! sparkling waves and deep pools and endless seas. 

This is about my fiftieth try at just making something that looked like ordinary water. It turned out quite cool, but has a lot of layers for such a simple looking thing.

Ignore the mutant tree - the key with sparkling oceans is not to use any paint at all. Of course! How obvious.

And then we went down the very dodgy rabbit hole of reflections in water. Oh my stars, so many things to think about. Is the water smooth? Is it ruffled? Is the object dark (in which case the reflection is lighter) or light (in which case the reflection is darker). Put a tiny amount of the colour in the reflection, but not too much. Make all your water lines horizontal. It gets slightly darker away from you (or was it toward you? Can't remember). Yeeks.

A bit of a shambles

The seminar I was organising on Friday turned into a bit of chaos after the queen died - lots of formal parliamentary things happening and just general distraction. Which I suppose is normal, it doesn't happen very often, but made for a stressful day. But what can you do. The sittings this week have been cancelled so I'm contemplating a bit of extra free time and trying to make sure I make the most of it! Perhaps I can go through that mess of papers that's been building up on my desk (I am a Very Untidy Worker).

The weekend was quiet, which was needed after the week. The cat discovered that the sun comes across the bed in the late afternoon, which she rather liked. I did a nice long walk, with an accidental 21 gun salute as I was walking past. Yay hail to me. I didn't go out front for the 96 gun salute on Friday at dusk (frankly after about ten guns all you're seeing is a cloud of smoke) but I did get caught up in the traffic as I tried to leave for home. Definitely a Wine Friday. 

And then I had a Shopping Saturday which was equally delightful. New walking shoes as I had literally worn a hole in the soles of the other ones, new leggings for the same reason (not a hole, just sad elastic), a couple of fluffy jumpers and lots of unnecessary paint pens / paper / watercolour pencils because why not. Art supplies are a very slippery slope.

Windy weekend

I had a grey and blowy weekend down the coast - but still lovely. I made two optimistic sundresses out of rayon; loose, flowy, unflattering and very comfortable. Not sure how much I'll be wearing them if it doesn't warm up a bit soon. I was not at all tempted to swim.

I meant to do useful things like turning out a drawer or cleaning the exhaust fan ... but I didn't. I didn't even go for very long walks, just a couple of beach strolls. The only bright side was when my 3 pm Friday meeting was cancelled, so I snuck off a bit early. Hahaha, way to stick it to the man.

And I found the cane hutch we put out for the hard waste on the neighbour's back porch :) I took a sneaky photo to show my husband as proof that someone did actually want it! It's a perfect set of porch shelves, ugly but solid. We are very happy to see it getting a second (third? fourth?) life. 

Documentary evidence

In case you needed it here is proof that I did, indeed, wear a cow costume with a dotty apron at the 1981 end of year musical show. And, apparently, brown woolly gloves and socks for that allover cow look. In my memory the apron was red with white dots, but it is clearly white with red dots. And my mother had edged that apron with lace trim! No wonder she wasn't going to have a bar of anyone criticising it. That is above and beyond.

Dad also commented on my last post about the tutu saga, which I also remember quite clearly. This was a couple of years earlier, when I did ballet, and for the end of year performance we had to have tutus ... the way my mum told the story was that she and the other mums went downtown and bought a tutu pattern,  netting and fabric on the sketchiest of instructions from the dance teacher ("toning pastels" or similar) and then when they later showed the dance teacher what they had bought it was the wrong set of "toning pastels" and she insisted that they go and buy a patterned chiffon to make matching over-tutus. 

So my mother not only made a pale pink tutu FROM SCRATCH (and that is a lot of netting ruffles, individually gathered and stitched on) but then a fitted chiffon over-top with ugly puffed sleeves that basically hid the tutu anyway. As you can see from this photo, which is me and my sisters. The pink tutu has narrow spaghetti straps in  traditional fashion, and everyone unanimously agreed (i.e the mums and the ballet girls) that the flowery chiffon was an ugly disaster. But we all did it, because we were scared of the ballet teacher? Maybe? Or maybe 1970s suburbia was a more compliant time. 

I googled the dance teacher. She was given the NZ Order of Merit last year for services to dance. A shame my mother wasn't around to comment on that one :)