Last week I shared a tiny weaving I made using embroidery thread, with a piece of cardboard as a loom. I used colours from a colour scheme I made from a photo of some lupins.
The colours are so beautiful, I still feel like I haven’t exhausted them!
Wanting to play about with them a little bit more earlier in the week, I located my watercolours and had a fun hour or so of no pressure, low expectations painting.
Neat paintings of actual things can be difficult and frustrating if it’s not either something that comes naturally or a skill we have acquired. We might feel that is has to be perfect, and then we feel bad when it is not.
Putting ourselves under pressure to achieve perfect results can take the fun away, and makes us feel worried instead.
This is not why most of us do creative things! We want to feel happy and relaxed while we deliberately exercise the creative part of ourselves. It’s like the difference between going for a long walk through a forest as opposed to putting on lycra and working out at the park, or doing a triathlon when you hate running, you can’t really swim and the last time you rode a bike you fell off. Not fun. Walking through a forest on the other hand is wonderful.
Anyway.
There’s no pressure in painting stripes, or sploshing paint about just for fun.
Like with the weaving, I wanted to experiment with putting different colours next to each other. Sometimes they can look quite different depending on what colours they are next to. Some colours will make them look duller, whereas others will make them brighter and more vibrant.
Stripes
It was very easy to paint stripes onto watercolour paper, and impossible to go wrong! The pink and the purple next to the green is lovely.
I then hit on another idea, and cut the stripes up, rearranged them, then stuck them down into a new arrangement. I think I like this even more, and the colours are just beautiful.
Here’s a video of how I went about it.
Splodges
This time I put some water on the paper first. I didn’t completely cover it. I just dabbed it on a biggish patches, so that some of the paper was still dry. Then I got painting!
The splodges were vaguely like billowy flowers. Again, it’s impossible to go wrong! I splodged the paint onto the paper. Where the water was, the colours bled into each other.
There’s a video here.
Tips For Using Watercolour
One thing I have realised about myself recently is how much unfamiliar things can bother me! New things make me uncomfortable, and I worry about remembering what to do, if it’s that kind of thing, as well about messing it up.
So if you are also somebody who often finds the idea of trying something new intimidating, here are some tips.
You don’t need a watercolour set with hundreds of colours. A small set of 24 will be plenty, plus black and white.
Mix your own colours where possible, and use the same ones. With the six colours I used for my painting, I used the purple, the pinky red (can’t remember the name!), Prussian blue, lemon yellow, and white.
Both greens were made using lemon yellow and Prussian blue. I put more blue in the darker one.
For the pinks I used pinky red, plus some white.
The purples were the purple in the set (purple can be a difficult colour to make, especially if you want a bright one), some Prussian blue to tone it down a bit, and white.
Using a limited number of colours is what will give the painting cohesion. It’s amazing how many different colours you can make from just a few!
Make a nice big puddle of each colour. It’s almost impossible to get the same colour if you run out, and you can always use them again by adding water once they’ve dried. So don’t worry about washing your palette afterwards!
If it’s a warm day, things will dry out fast, so don’t be afraid to work quickly. Working quickly is also good for avoiding overthinking!
It can really help to view the whole thing as a kind of experiment. Things sometimes go wrong in experiments, and it’s expected. We learn at least as much when things go wrong as we do when they go right.
So if you have a colour scheme that you haven’t quite finished with, I encourage you to have a go painting stripes and splodges!
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