Gratitude

101 BIRDS - Painting #31

Quick watercolor paintings like this one are still the hardest for me to achieve. For some reason I am scared to practice them more (even though I love them). This guy makes me smile, so he deserves to be number 31 in my bird series.

Happy weekend!

101 BIRDS - Painting #26

As much as I love the heavy use of colors, texture and layers, I also really love the clean look of loosely worked watercolor. I can rarely achieve that look, but in this case I think I got it :-)

ATC technique and a giveaway

I stumbled yesterday onto THIS site and found a link to a tutorial for Intuitive Watercolor Wash Faces. It seemed like a lot of fun, and I could hardly wait to try it. 

The basic idea is to quickly add washes of color to watercolor paper, somewhat face shaped but very loose and free. You can see what my "faces" looked like after that first stage.

Then I spent some time playing with black and white inks and got this result.

This was really fun! More and more I love the feeling I get when creating without expectations.

I am going to sign up for the ATC swap at Art Colony, and three of my ATCs will go there.

Since I made more than three, I thought I might offer the forth one to one of you.

If you would like to win one of these four ATC cards, leave a comment with the card number you like the most and I will randomly pick a number on Monday morning.

New obsession?

I took the Pear-ology class with Martha Lever, and now I can't stop painting pears...

It is so .. much .. fun!!!

I think I am falling in love with watercolors.

They are somehow clean (for the lack of a better word). The opposite of messy acrylics. And you know how much I love the messiness of acrylics. I guess I like it all.

Hana patiently watched as my pear collection grew, but when she saw this last one, she couldn't resist to comment: "What, you have a new obsession? Not birds anymore? Pears?" 

I guess so. They landed in my journal too. What can I say - I guess I am obsessed.

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Through the magic of modern technology this post will go up while my plane starts soaring.... and several more will show up in the following days. 

I moved things around the blog - closed my etsy shops, and added instagram! I never really "got" facebook, and although I have an account I rarely use it, but instagram seems like a really pretty place and I am enjoying it right now. I will try to post some photos while I'm away, but I'm warning you - I am total newbie there, just learning my first steps.

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Sorry for the lack of e-mail communication. I really appreciate every comment, even when I can't write back.

Have a happy weekend!

Happy April!!!

I still suffer from a lack of words, so I'm just trying to stay connected with little paintings...

Art therapy

I'm all over the place this week.... a million things on my mind, so I can't really concentrate on anything. The best way I found to deal with it today?

Phonebook faces drawn repeatedly on many, many pages with your non-dominant hand à la Katie Kendrick. It felt so good to not really think, and just go through the movements of making marks. These are now in my journal and will probably be altered in the future, but for now - they were like medicine.

And just for fun - a little watercolor guy saying "HI".

Many journal pages

I am working busily in my journal every day, just as I said I would. All my other journals have paintings, maybe a quote or found poem, but no real writing. Here, I am writing a lot, which complicates the blog showing part, because I want to write freely, without judgement and yet - the show-off part of me wants to present them here. 

 See the arrow in the above picture? It points to my first ever hand cut number stamps! Carving them made me ridiculously happy... and I love them in all their imperfect glory.

The following spread started as a quick painting inspired by a photo of two cats, and then came the writing, and the fish.... and now I can't paint over it because I like the background so much that I want to keep it that way. The good thing is that there are many more pages in the journal, so I can do just that, and maybe write over it one day if I get bored of the 'empty' space.

The art part of the journal workshop is easy and fun and I could do it constantly. The written assignments not so much... I promised myself that I will do them, and I am, no matter how uncomfortable they make me feel. I realized that I spend many hours not wanting to do them, procrastinating as much as I can, and yet - when I start to write, I can't seem to stop. So, my guess is that it really is good for me, just as Judy Wise says. 

 See.... a LOT of writing!

And then some more...  The videos and very unusual prompts are posted daily, and as much as I try, I am not keeping up with them. Maybe if I stop procrastinating, and actually start writing now, maybe I'll get there. It is really a lot of fun and brings me a ton of joy. Can't help but wonder if I will fill the journal, or get tired of it after a while and move to something else... We'll see...

More to come...