Practise, practise, practise

Hello all and thanks for dropping in. In the last few weeks I have been playing quite a bit with watercolours, trying to master this tricky medium a little better. I was not really sure whether I should share what I have been up to, but seeing that after I shared some recent moody watercolour landscapes many of you said you wanted to see more, I thought oh well,-  so here goes, - a series of little flower and other nature elements practice pieces....

Some of these were done from photos, others from real life. In this one, the nest was from a photo, the blossoms and leaf I picked on a recent walk.

Mistletoe and Hawthorn, much loved by ancient druids for their magical properties (from photos)

Hawthorn blossom, an interpretation done from memory.

The next two are very poor attempts to capture moods in a looser style, they were inspired by the amazing watercolour artist Ann Blockley

The background on this one is really terrible, but hey ho, I decided to show it anyway....

Well, - there you go, - practice, practice, practice, - I need to do a lot more of that, but if nothing else, at least I am having fun, that's if I don't get too frustrated with myself. 

Thanks for indulging me with these little pieces, have a good weekend and see you next time

xxx

Some moody watercolours

Hello everyone and thanks for dropping in here today.
Those of you who follow my blog and my work will know that I LOVE stamps. I am sure I have hundreds of them, if not more. BUT.... their one draw back is that they can make you lazy. It's so quick to ink up a stamp and press it down. Creating your own art work does take a lot longer....

Anyway, I thought it was high time to take out my paints and pencils once more and do some original artwork, going back to my first love, - watercolour.
So, today, as I am on holiday and have a little more time, I am sharing some of my recent watercolour explorations. A series of moody watercolours and a little portrait.

It's a story from winter into Spring, - so here goes:

A wintry one with the last patches of snow

Evening sun set

Pale winter sun in the late afternoon

River bank (the composition went wrong and I ran out of space for the foreground tree, - duh)....

This was meant to be more Spring like, but it all got a bit dark. I think I have been rather influenced by the weather here which has been rather dark lately.

And here is a little child's portrait, children's faces always fascinate me, it's so hard to capture their innocence...

Well, that's it for today, thanks for visiting and indulging me with my little arty efforts. I'll be back with some more crafty/ mixed media projects soon, meanwhile, hope you get time to do something creative!

Inspired by 2.... Messages of Spring

Hello all, today I am sharing my second "inspired by" piece and this time the artist I was inspired by is Susan Winget. I especially love her nature paintings, - if you don't know her, I have a Pinterest board dedicated to her, you can find it here

I did not copy any of her pieces directly, I just kind of followed her style (and boy do I have a lot to learn still). I used a combination of watercolours, Derwent Inktense pencils and some stamping with both Archival and Distress Inks.

This is the only focal stamp I used, it's by Inkylicious and I coloured it with Inktense pencils.

The bird and branches were hand painted, fantasy style. I put it in a little frame like Susan often does. I apologize for the fuzzy photo.

The butterfly is also hand painted. I really struggled with that one and did not find it easy at all to get the shape right, much more practice needed me thinks.

Here you can see some more of the background stamping, the little crown is from the Tim Holtz Correspondence set and the letters from Documented set. The swirls around the edges are a Stepmel Glede stamp.

Well that's pretty much it. I enjoyed kind of going back to doing some hand drawing and painting, so expect to see more.....

Thank you for dropping by here today

xxx

Watercolour fun

Hello all, just another sneak peek today, - sharing a project on the Shimmerz blog today again, a little watercolour painting, inspired by their new water colour paints and the weather here in Scotland....

This is just a little corner as you might have guessed, to see the rest, just click HERE. All a bit different from my usual stuff, but I had fun with it!!

Thanks for your visit!! Oh and welcome to new followers, so lovely to see you here!!

It's a Magical World...

Good morning and thank you so much for dropping by here. Welcome to friends old and new alike!
I am still very fortunate to have the time and piece to play in my nature journal. Today I am sharing a little painting of a foxglove (Digitalis), poisonous as you may know.

The following was copied from a site about this special plant:

Foxglove was used for working magic, for protection, and communicating with fairies, elves, and woodland spirits. It had many names; lion's mouth, fairy caps, folk's glove, and witches thimbles. In France, it is known as gant de notre dame, or our lady's glove.

I thought it interesting that while Foxglove (digitalis purpurea) is very poisonous to humans if misused, it is been used as a heart medicine and also for cleansing the kidneys.

The countryside here in our little place in Burgundy is filled with foxgloves, my drawing sadly is rather a poor specimen compared to the beauty of the real thing...

I mounted it on a bit of paper created with the help of kitchen salt. I was recently inspired by the beautiful papers created by Maria from Maria's Knutselplezier and before  left hope I made some papers to take along as I wanted to use some for this journal.

Anyway, the rest of te page was created with the help of Distress inks texture aste through a mask, and various background stamps. The dragon fly, another magical creature was of course a Tim Holtz stamp, stamped on water colour paper that was coloured with inks and moon shadow mists.

Though I took a ton of craft supplies with me, I completely forgot about embossing powders otherwise I would have embossed my sentiment in white. As an alternative I stamped with white paint but it was not very successful as you can see, I find clear stamps don't stamp very well with paint... I went over it in a white pen to make it a bit better.
Here is a close up still and some pictures of my salt papers

These are so much fun to do! Just splash away some wet media, inks, sprays or paints, sprinkle over some rock salt and leave to dry to let the magic happen all by itself!

Well that's it from me for today...

Rather a long post, so thank you for sticking with me and have a creative day!!