Different again

So this is more Diane Antone that is different again - not delicate watercolour but mixed media with a bit more oomph. At some point she said that if you’re not sure about a painting just keep going adding things, which is very different from the more intellectual angle that many watercolour painters take. They like to call it the ‘thinker’s medium’ because you have to preplan, and plot out your whites and lights right at the beginning, and plop your water on then your paint and leave it alone … none of this touching up you can do with acrylics or oils. Apparently. Not my forte, pre-thinking, but I like the plopping and leaving alone. 

Anyway, these pumpkins were the effort of ten minutes at a time each evening for about a week. More orange! More paint! A bit of coloured pencil. And some pen. Then more paint. It’s still not great (they look like large orange pouffes) but a different way of attacking it.

This was straight mixed media - a sort of landscape. Maybe. Diane also says that if you put a wiggly kind of border around it then people know you don’t mean it seriously, and it takes all the pressure off. Makes no difference to the picture at all, but suddenly nobody is under the illusion that this is Art, and you can do whatever you want. Just by putting in a wiggly border. Genius.

And here we have a mushroom forest scene. Probably more from life if you do live in northern France and not eastern Australia… although with the rain we are having I expect mushrooms to start sprouting from the carpet soon. Such a tremendous wet - I know it’s terrible climate change but it’s hard to just not be grateful for rain after the bad dry.  And lastly we have a colourful sunflower, paint, white gouache and watercolour pencils and marker pen too.