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).

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.

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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 "101 Watercolor techniques"

Today I did two projects from the "101 Watercolor techniques" book. Both turned out quite well with some caveats. Number 3 - Cool monochromes The exercise is about mixing Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine to get variations in color. I struggled to get enough reddish brown to display so I had to do a second wash in places to get a nice final result. That was a bit of a cop out but I figured by struggling I had learned a bit of the lesson anyway. Number 4 - Warm monochromes This one is about letting two warm colors mix on the paper. In retrospect I should have done more of that with number 3 as well. This exercise also mostly worked except I didn't get the veins painted until the yellow paint was getting to dry. As a result they look a bit added on - as they are.

Crashing water

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