Welcome to my Sunday Sevens; a post where I share seven or so photos from my week.
It’s been a another damp wet week on Dartmoor. Between showers Lovely Husband finished the making our first raised bed.
While I discovered our first fruits on the tomatoes…
Sorry, camera insists on focusing beyond the greenhouse.
I also started propagating my mint that’s getting very pot-bound and scraggly…
With LH’s help I planted a bush that I grew from a cutting of bush that was too overgrown and woody when we moved into out house to save. Can anyone tell me what this is?
Just as the hairdressers are reopening I plucked up the courage to let LH cut my hair…
The dark bits are LH’s
As I know you’ll complain if you don’t see the cut, here it is. Sunglasses on because standards have slipped dramatically during lock down and I’m wear no makeup…
Last week I showed you a couple of birds I’d painted when I stumbled across a series of free loose bird painting tutorials, made by Tom Sheppard. Continuing with this series I’ve now painted a Kingfisher…
…and a goldfinch…
Hate that green bit
I then decided to branch out on my own and paint the original a loose blue tit, I meant to learn to paint from this series, without even looking at Tom’s blue tit tutorial.
Almost immediately I started I was kicking myself for wetting the breast first and not using broken brush strokes on dry paper like Tom had taught me. I moved on and painted the rest wet on dry. Then I looked back at the whole bird – yes, I know I should have taken a picture to show you – and realised that when I painted the breast I’d defaulted to the process and style I really love; wet on wet.
Yes, Tom’s birds are beautiful. Broken brush strokes are beautiful. But I’m not Tom and I what I love is the wet in wet process and the look of watercolour when it does it’s ‘watercoloury thing’.
I then rather botched the bird to try and make it look more like my sort of painting. It’s certainly far from a masterpiece, but here it is; neither the way I’d learned from the bird series or the way my heart would have chosen to paint it!
Hopefully next time I show you a blue tit painting it will be painted from my heart. Having said that, I certainly learnt some things from Tom – thank you Tom – and no doubt you’ll be seeing the odd broken brush stroke in my work, but from here on in, (mostly) more soft, more watercoloury pictures.
When I finished painting the blue tit I showed you in my last post, I decided I wanted to try and paint it in a loser style.
I looked for a tutorial on YouTube to help me and came across one by Tom Sheppard. It was part of a series on loose birds, so I decided to start with the first episode; painting a raven. In my first attempt I got it all too wet…
The second was better, but not great…
…. and the third not much better…
I then moved into the second tutorial for an avocet. I painted a rubbish bird, then made a a right hash attempting to add a background. I then made it worse trying to improve the background…
The third tutorial was for a magpie. I’m not fond of magpies and I was fed up with painting near black birds, so I skipped to episode four; a flamingo. This was a bit of a step change on the colours front, so I practiced on an unstretched piece of paper…
… and then used stretched paper…
I think I prefer the practice piece.
Then I tried to add a background and made it worse…
A long way to go, but that’s my progress to far and all those birds definitely helped improve my understanding of control of wet on wet watercolour and learn a few things about backgrounds.
And if you’re wondering, the blue tit is episode eight, so I may be a while before I get to that.
