fun with abstract watercolours

Ok, having got my watercolours out, I decided to keep going. It is my first love (as far as art is concerned) so opened my sketch book and I idly found something to paint. The trouble with painting at home is finding inspiration, at least for me. This is a copy of a painting in a leisure magazine. Not too good but it was a first quick sketch. A few minutes only whereas Quiet Water was done at my art group and took me the best part of two hours.

- perhaps the open door should have been coloured in. The photo suffers from a low resolution scan image, always a problem with water colours. I took to photographing my paintings but didn't feel it was worth the effort here.

The next sketch was a freehand landscape out of my head ( I really like this sort of painting, and used to do them all the time. The more you do the more realistic and the more detailed they tend to become). This one needed a few birds to bring it to life.

I liked the colours in this one, I would rather be a little free with colours in a landscape than stick to too many greens. Not that there is anything wrong with green.... you understand. Again the sky shows the problem with low resolution scanning. It cannot cope with the subtlety of watercolours merging. I was fairly happy with this one, and I do like leafless trees/bushes. they don't hide the background.

The next picture was moving even further toward an abstract, something I have actually come to like since having to readup and learn about modern painting for a talk/workshop I gave to my art group . (More later)

Don't ask me about this one, I had lots of blue left - I had used a very strong blue and mixed a large puddle, one of the problems of not having had the paints out for some time I guess. So I laid in a wash and made a few exploratory marks. And you know , I liked it. I think of it as reflections of poplar trees in a lake. You can make of it whatever you will.

But the talk I gave to my group....... A couple of years ago, we decided to try and inject a little something extra into our weekly meetings and to try to develop ourselves as artists (without being pretentious) we couldn't afford professional tutors/demonstrators so it was decided to hold quarterly workshops to be run by one of the group. I was chosen to do the first.... and because I was the only one who had done anything remotely abstract.... that was to be my subject.

I asked around the group what people expected and they said to me that they would like to go away from the workshop having painted an abstract painting. We are a very practical group, after all; and that seemed like a useful target.


I researched work by the masters from the impressionists to the american expressionists and decided that no matter what the painting, if it was any good (personal choice?) it had to follow the rules of composition. the biggest problem for most of the members was that of knowing where to start. So I devised a simple set of instructions, a bit like a recipe card. BUT the starting point was to be a small set of shapes/lines that they had chosen before putting pen/pencil/brush to paper. For example:- two squares, a circle and two lines. They were then to sketch in these shapes (thumbnail size - this was before I discovered aceo/atc) and colour them in.


Sounds simple - sounds childish? Don't believe it. For people who had only painted from pictures it was a major issue. Unfortunately none of them were inspired to do abstracts but I have cmpletely changed my own way of working and now do far more abstract work than figurative or realistic work.

Here are two examples from the list given above as an example, ie two square, two lines and a circle. It is interesting how such simple instructions can lead to such a variety of images. Why not try it for yourselves?

I actually love developing these little paintings and one can actually lose the shapes if the idea is taken one step further. But that will have to wait for another time, I have other things to do now. Thanks for your attention and your time, see you next time.

A new watercolour painting at last

I bought myself a new rubber stamp this week and tried it out with this new ATC, called Diamond Lil (not a very original name I know) but I had these large glass gems and didn't know what to do with them so............ I quite liked this to start with but think I should have added more detail but for the life of me I didn't know where to put it. Still it has been posted off to a new owner so it's too late now.

The amazing thing is that I have at last got my watyercolours out again, first time in ages and managed to complete a painting (2.5 x 3.5) but I can't call it an atc because I have put it up for sale on on Ebay. I have opened a shop again as my son has asked me to seel some more of his CD collection so I have decided to post a few paintings and see what happens. I also registered on Etsy a little while ago but have still not put up anything for sale on that site yet.

Anyway the painting is presented here, entitled, "Quiet Water". Hopefully the first of many more now that I have an Ebay shop to pay for.

simple ATC's and digital collages

New art has been a little slow coming this week. But I have managed a couple of challenge atc's. The first is based on a theme of eyes from the Make It Mondays challenge on Lisa Vollrath's Go Make Something site. A very simple ATC.... layers of coloured paper, a few circular stampings and an image of eyes.

The second is one in which I have put to use the bottle images whch I started to use previously but never quite got around to completing. This was for a lottery challenge on the Yahoo group Blindswaps.

Apart from these my crafting time has been spent on making artwork for kids with very serious illnesses who are featured on a site called Make A Child Smile. This is also thro' a project/challenge on the same Blindswaps group. From the MACS site three kids are featured every month and members make a piece of art for these and send them as RAK's.

As I used proprietary images ( a WWF wrestling star and carebears) for ttwo of the cards, I am not posting them on this site but I did get to do some digital collaging for the third and here are some images from this.









a little larger than intended but never mind just this once..... It was certainly a fun project and got to learn a little about the subjects of the artworks, yes including the Care bears... I did Funshine, Bedtime Bear and Oopsy Bear. LOL

Now to get on with some serious crafting .......

Black & White challenge ATC's

I have been on a short trip to Prague with my better half (bless her cotton socks for all the shopping we put in over the four days we were there). I was going to post a few photos of our sight-seeing triip but thought, "hey they can look it up on the web, and the photos will probably be better than I can show". So I have only one photo to show, It is actually an indoor shot from the Palladium shopping centre near the Republic Square in the Old Town. The photo is actually part of a frieze, decorating the gent's urinal. I needed four shots to get it all in but will only bore you with one. this has to be the overiding image of Prague for me.

I will tell you it can be quite intimidating using this facility, for most fellows and certainly caused a few laughs.

Anyway back to art.................... here are a couple of ATC's I made just before I flew off last week. It was for a challenge I had to set after winning the lottery with my ATC, "Carnival" as described in the last post. The titles are pretty self evident so I will leave you with the images








More art as soon as I have settled back in and cut the lawn and cliped the hedges and..................

Another wining ATC

What luck.............


I joined a couple of groups not long ago to increase my swapping opportunities and I have already mentioned winning a monthly lottery with my ATC entry called "Good Fortune " I have just found out that I have also won a second lottery on another group with this entry, "Carnival"

I am looking forward to recieving some fantastic ATC's from the other entries. I wonder to myself how much is this down to sheer luck....... or to my being a new member in these groups.

I now have to choose the new theme for the next lottery and pick a winner, the question is how do I choose?

Just for good measure, here are a couple of entries for the lottery on the first group (which I can't win this time)

I will be off-line for the next few days, so the appearance of comments will be delayed a little but please do feel free to make any comments as it is always great to hear from readers.

I have to dash now but next time I will be posting links to these groups, which are both on Yahoo. Adios

three new ATC's (Make it Mondays challenge)

Hi, its late and I have spent a glorious day in the garden, getting quite a lot done and it is now looking good. Note to myself.... must post a photo or two! Anyway, I have just discovered the Make it Monday challenge on the Go Make Something site (Lisa Vollrath). I actually came across it 3 or 4 weeks ago and did a digital image of Desperate Dan. I decided this weekend to start doing the challenge every week and thought as a first step I would catch up with the last three weeks. I have done so and wanted to get them on to the blog this evening, its time for a new post anyway.
Here they are, I actually found this to be quite difficult because I usually work from whatever I find which gets my creative juices running. So it was a real challenge. I may not have made three "great" works of art but it was fun and I think it taught me something.

The first was to do something with the theme of music. I found this difficult since I did not have the right images to hand but turned it around slightly (artist's licence) to become a card around Dance.

The second was to use a quotation... I again took a slight liberty and used the first two lines of a poem by Margaret Houghton. the main imagaes were heat embossed, a very new technique for me so it was a little bit of practice.

The last here is based on the colour RED. I call this holiday dreams. One of the reasons that I was keen to do all three was that I have been tasked with the job of writing about my ideas on the subject of the use of themes in ATC ( or any art). We tend to use the word loosely and although the above are said to be based on themes, I am more concerned with a theme within the art work. But that is for a future post. For now I hope you enjoy the images.

My ATC's are getting to be prettier

Hi, don't know if any regular readers ( assuming of course that I do have regular readers) have noticed but my ATC cards seem to be becoming prettier. This has not been a conscious decision and I am not necessarily upset by it, but I though it worth a mention. I can't help feeling this may be because I have been making a few greeting cards. My wife sees the opportunity to send some of her friends individually crafted cards and of course not knowing what they actually would like I guess they tend to be fairly conventional. When I first started making ATC's they were often humorous, but looking thru my back postings I find that there was a definite prettiness there too.


I guess that over the past few months (?) I have been more concerned with technique (and I have tried and learned the use of a lot of techniques) and maybe my style has drifted because of that. There are lots more of course that I want to try, and have today ordered a copy of Bernie Berlins book Artist Trading Cards Workshop: Create, Collect, Swap from Amazon.


Anyway, here are three more ATC's which I have completed this weekend, they have already been swapped and posted.

The first is titled, "Love is the key". You may remember the painted backings, which I posted a little while ago. the key is fixed loosely to the heart with coloured wire ( I was given a box with 24 reels for last Christmas and have hardly used them at all so far) everything is glued down.

Titled, "Hope" after the embossed text. Another acrylic backing with stamped chinese characters (I actually bought a black Stazon ink-pad for doing this), the card is completed with collage and a fancy thread attached via an eyelet.

Finally, "She Sparkled". A collage onto black card, stamped with gold stars (not Stazon,LOL). I painted the dress, armband and hair ribbon with mica-containing watercolours which is where I got the title from. I finished it with those faux gems across the arch and wrote on the title.

Many of my crafting friends would be commenting on a lack of "grunge" - well Tim Holtz may yet get my custom, but for now "enough is enough".

Oh I nearly forgot..... the second card in the last post was entered by me into a weekly lottery challenge in a group I have just joined and declared the winner (sorry I left off the title, but it is the one with the smiling sun), the challenge was to use circles, ribbon and faces. I am now looking forward to receiving lots of lovely ATC cards thru the post.