Ah Spring, The sun is out longer each day, the snow is melting all away, soon we'll see colours at play, as spring puts on her bright display.

Ok so I am a better painter than poet :) but it's always a joy to see colours in nature. This winter I have been painting using lots of colour in my animals, yet the colours are often hidden, subtle just like they are outside. I have been studying if any of the rocks in our area have pigment, but while it seems that on the coast there are many, here there are few to none in any in any amount. So I looked to nature. I went for a walk and noticed pale green beard lichen on the trees and collected it to see if I could draw the colour out to make paint or dye. It's a painstaking process as aft…

Christmas Gifts

This year for Christmas my ever-encouraging husband gave me a 16X20 pad of watercolour paper with the implicit instructions that I was not allowed to cut the pages into smaller sizes. Recently I had finally made the bold move of opening my professional 300 pound watercolour sheets that I purchased. These sheets are 20X30 each, but I wasn't bold enough to use a whole sheet - no - I cut off a small 6 inch strip and made that into three even smaller pieces before using them. For experimentation and practice purposes small is lovely, because watercolour dries quickly and I could work within that time on anything under 12X18. And I feel oddly guilty over spending money on my…

It seems to me that those who try watercolour fall into three categories: Those who dip their toe in, find it frustrating, and move on to other forms of art; those who wade in, don't mind the hobby but it stays at that; and those who get in up to their necks (or deeper!) and realize that there is so many choices of paper, paint, brushes that they soon realize they may be drowning in either options or debt (or both). Ok I think I have pushed that metaphor as far as I can.

"It's the poor craftsman that blames the tools?" No.

Watercolour can be frustrating when beginning for many. Watercolour is a liquid medium designed to flow on the paper, but the quality of the paper and the paint will affect how it moves and plays and how it looks when dried. Most beginner student varieties of paint…

Old man winter has hit in Tumbler Ridge - and as the number of daylight hours decrease my painting hours increase as does my time to get a bit organized. I have been posting images I painted over the spring and summer in my blogs. Last week I pulled up four paintings done using a reference photo of a snowy mountain with beautiful striations giving the mountain character.

I had chosen this mountain image to practice negative painting, allowing the white paper to be the snow, and to develop my style. Artists interpret a picture, choosing what to include in a painting, the details to paint, and what to leave as simple shapes or shades. This is easier for me when I have been to the site experienced the image as my style leans towards expressionism, so I painted four images before getting the white peaks and striations the wa…