Skip to main content

Suddenly crashed into art again

Hi, My name is Lola Slade. I live in Toronto, Canada. I started this blog to try to capture some of the excitement I have about making artwork again. I started this blog about 5 weeks after getting started with painting again which was back in December 2020 during Christmas break. I grabbed a cheap watercolor set, a small set of cheap Walmart brushes plus a couple of the store brand white taklon brushes. I also picked up an an instruction book. (Already had the pad of watercolor paper from an impulse purchase a few years ago). 


My first watercolor supplies


 Forty dollars didn't seem too bad. I didn't know what I was getting into!



I am still trying to keep my art hobby on a budget but once the enthusiasm took over that is proved hard. I will be writing about materials as I go through the inevitable upgrade curve.

My restart was after a really long break from creating. More than 20 years ago I went to art school for a year. Once I started again I found I could still basically copy photographs in pencil. The rest I am going to have to learn or relearn.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Work from "101 Watercolor techniques" - Exercise 005

This exercise was a bit of a struggle for a beginner. Believe it or not the result below is the third attempt. The point of the exercise was to get a result of depth on the paper using only analogous colours and without using color gradation. I am sure I learned something from it. What I think I struggled with among other things was "water control" - keeping the water within the small leaf areas from running.  Learning: As I went along I had a little bit more freedom with the strokes. I started to notice how the exercise author was using negative space and tried to replicate it. \

Simple apple painting

 Not sure if this is more successful than my first fruit painting but I certainly thought about it more. I tried to use lifting to get the white spots on the skin (which I think worked ok) and for the reflections around the edge (which didn't really work). I also tried adding white after for the waxy white part of the skin. I know it's not recommended I just wanted to see what it would look like.

Work from Everyday Watercolor - Day 3 - Triangles

This is an exercise in brush control and glazing. It worked better than my first attempt at glazing. I only had one spot where the color started lifting. (Left side bright yellow triangle) Materials Strathmore 400 paper W&N Cotman Gamboge W&N Cotman Permanent Rose New to me: New color: Using W&N Cotman Gamboge New color: Using W&N Cotman Permanent Rose Learned from this Triangles are very forgiving. If you go past the end you can just make them bigger. When glazing there is a little bit of a "hump" when transitioning from paper to paint that requires practice not to jiggle and make the line waver.