I have always said that I am not an artist, yet I have been able to add art to almost all the things that I make. Today, I want to explore the world of watercolor. I have been inspired by my good friend Wendy Dewar Hughes and her work on SummerBay Studio. She has put together an article that teaches you how to watercolor and to not be intimidated with it. I still am but will try in a way without the actual paintbrush.
Image by Artist Wendy Dewar Hughes
As I use Illustrator for much of my arts and crafts, the watercolor I use is through paint brushes I create or find inside the program. The results are often not as perfect as I would like (there goes that perfect word again) but I am happy with the results. I found things like a blob brush to give a drawing an unusual spin. Roses with leaves not having to paint inside the lines. I guess we could call this artistic license. I can use this for my excuse at any rate.
I have been inspired by all the colors that have been made available and also found that I needed to see them grouped in a way. I created some palettes inside of Pinterest to give me even more ways to see colors as they related to each other.
Palette Colors from a Photograph
Watercolor is a forgiving medium and allows for broad strokes of the brush to gain an effect. I love the results I have seen from Wendy and from my daughter Carina. I am sharing their work here along with my attempts. I know this is going to take a lot of practice to get where I want to be with watercolor and I know I can use this in other places for my designs.
Rose - Watercolor in Illustrator
Have you ever tried watercolor?
Here are a couple of books that may inspire you:
1. Everyday Watercolor: Learn to Paint Watercolor in 30 Days
2. Painting in Watercolor: The Indispensable Guide
3. Paint Yourself Calm: Colourful, Creative Mindfulness Through Watercolour
As you can probably imagine my bookshelf is weighted down with a lot of reading material. I am not sure if I mentioned that I am also an Internationally published author so my love of reading and collecting books comes by naturally! I particularly love the Paint Yourself Calm book - somehow it renews the soul and helps me to be more creative!
I am going to see if I can incorporate watercolor into paper engineering. That definitely sounds like a challenge but somehow I can see the two working together quite nicely. It will be one of those projects that will take a few days to do and I am happy to experiment and play around with it.
If you have any ideas about merging two or more "arts", let me know, I always love to learn new things!
BTW You can also go to Skillshare and find a few classes on watercolor, and, of course, there is always YouTube.
Until tomorrow...
Bette
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