New watercolours at last

Well here I am and not a collage in sight, promise.

This week in my art group we had a fun session. the subject of the workshop was "fast and loose with skies"; the leader of the session was one of the group. We have about half-a-dozen such sessions in each year in order to stretch and introduce new techniques/media to the group. Well most of us had used w/c's and of course we all paint skies - don't we? This particular member had been on a course with Ron Ranson and her paintings had improved tremendously because of it so we asked her to lead this evening for us.

Of course I quickly lost interest in blue skies. I always was a rebel! and my paintings began to look more like my recent abstracts, what a surprise. Such as:-

In the end everybody had great fun and we all felt that we had learned something. Personally I have always had great difficulty using the HAKE for painting; I find that it is either too wet and there is water everywhere, or too dry and the brush takes on a life of it's own. But I tried it once more and again tended to go my own way:-

At least I actually got out a brush and put some paint to paper. If I am honest, I even have a sneaking suspicion that I quite like the outcome; and guiltily wondered if they might make useful background for some collage work.

I did in fact take a 2.5x3.5 inch mount and take several photo's to see if they might even make one or two ACEO's (there's a freudian slip, I am now thinking of paintings in ths format as ACEO whilst collages are ATC's). Anyway here's how they might look with a little digital enhancement to the contrast since I took the photo's with flash and it has washed a lot of the colour depth out.

Well, make your own mind up, it's not great art but I have to have my fix!