PAINTING IN TUSCANY: Color

Showing posts with label Color. Show all posts

Inspiring watercolours! Acquerelli per ispirare!

I've been busy painting and with workshops, and once again it's a looong time since I showed any watercolours! But I've been working a lot the last months so soon there will be more to see!

E stato un periodo intenso, ho dipinto e lavorato tanto ma ho presto mostrerò altri miei lavori!

This particular painting was a lot of fun exploring the negative spaces

during the workshop with my friend and one of my teachers, swedish artist Monica Mansson one week ago!

To learn how to do the negative painting, go to vinca-rosea-step-by-step.

Mi sono divertita tanto a realizzare questo studio (e altri) dei spazi negativi,

partecipando al workshop di Monica Mansson, artista svedese, amica e una dei miei insegnanti!

Per vedere come dipingere al negativo vai a vinca-rosea-step-by-step.

Painting outdoors is always so peaceful and relaxing!

Dipingere dal vero e en plein air è sempre bellissimo!

Lesson 5: Play with your watercolours!

Take your material and start playing - it's easy and fun!

Start with any piece of watercolour paper and use clean water to wet it with your brush. Check the wetness of the paper by turning it and looking at it from the border : it should be damp all over, without pools!

Now choose 2 or 3 colours and start dropping colours onto the paper! You can mix some colours, if you want, or just let them mix on the paper.

Let the colours spread and see how beautiful the result is without any effort! This is the basics of wet-in-wet painting and You will enjoy playing like this even if you are a more experienced painter!

This is Wet in wet - It's easy!

Wet-in-wet is one of the basic watercolour techniques - so now practice!!

This post will be continued...

Paint what you love! Watercolour Lesson 4

A couple of close-ups of a sketch of my orchids!

When you've managed to get the materials that suit you personally, success is only a few steps away, here's the formula

Do something you love
Learn life long
Repeat steps 1 & 2

I found it here, link to Watercolour Painter, where you can get more information and find step to step instructions as well!

A lot of fun just playing with colours, capturing the pattern and colours of my flowers!

Watercolours allow you to play freely and get fresh sketches more than any other medium!

While this is a more traditional painting from some time ago! Link to my post here.

Watercolour Lesson 3: mixing colours!

So let's mix the colours we need! In the last post I said that you only need a few colours to start - actually with 3 basic colours you can easily mix all colours as this triangle above shows.

Just YELLOW, RED and BLUE.

Here I used lemon yellow, alizarin crimson and ultramarin blue.

By varying the quantity of the different colours you vary the tones.

I.e. using more yellow and less blue you get a lighter and brighter green. More blue will give a darker green.

For BROWNS you mix all the 3 colours - but ATTENTION- mixing them in exactly the same proportion might give a dull tone of brown! Excercise by mixing different browns adding more or less of the 3 basic colours.

What about the other colours you have? They will help you to mix different tones: for example the Prussian blue that is a greenish blue will be an excellent base for your greens adding either lemon yellow for spring green or cadmium yellow for moss green.

If you drop some cadmium red - it is a more orange red, i.e. with some yellow in it - into your green you will get beautiful brown shades.

And so on - mix the colours you have, try them on paper and write down the colours you used. This helps you finding your favourite colour combinations.

Mixing your own colours you will learn a lot and you will get vivid and interesting colours, not so flat as ready made colours might be!

Peony Love - Watercolour painting ready - or not?!

This is my insta photo from some time ago. I never managed to finish the painting, and now I don't know what to do... I need some suggestions from you!!

Now the painting looks like this, and I'm wondering what I should do: leave i this way, or...?

- what do you think!?

(I planned to add some more darks, some spring green to the leafs and stems, work on the water in the glass... and probably do some shadow/background...)

Because the flowers are gone and working from the photo is not so inspiring.

AND the risk is always to overwork a watercolour painting... I'm wandering if I should just leave it the way it is while waiting for new peonies in my garden next year!? Please let me know your opinion!!

Sketching Cypresses!

A picture from my smaller sketchbook from last week!

Just playing around with colors and a common object -cypruses!

Painting challenge!

It's time to show my ltest participation in the painting challenge by paintanddrawtogether.blogspot :

the entrance to Ottawa Parliament Building (click on the link for the reference picture).

This time I was quite happy with the colors (that I deliberately exagerated a little!), the light and the layers - but Oh! again: how hard isn't it to get a decent photo of your painting!?

A detail.

As so often, even now I did a few attempts!

New watercolors and Tuesday sketches - floral of course.

My dear friend is on holiday, and I'm watching her orchids, a beautiful subject and a good occasion to do some sketching with my new set of watercolors.

After many years of painting with just a few basic colors, I finally decided for a box with a set of many new colors. It was a very good buy, since the single colors would be much more expensive, and also I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with the new shades.

I'm also experimenting with plastic wrap for textures. It's interesting with patterns and designs appearing so magically... Still want to do some more and decide where I can use it... This is a first layer I'm gonna continue with, either adding more watercolor or maybe with a pencil, since I do see many shapes inside it.

Today - fresh paint in my sketchbook onTuesday!

I really like to play around with my watercolors and my sketchbook - and this time no flowers!

You can tell it isn't watercolor paper, but it's BIG - 30x36 cm - and it was a present from a dear friend plus I didn't find such a large sketchbook with watercolor paper yet!

BUT - I found this wonderful idea: make-your-own-watercolor-pad , just click on it!

It's VERY simple, and I'm definitely going to do it!!

It's a pity I just torn all the extra paper into SMALL pieces, I was planning to do some sketchbooks for gifts...

Always sketching flowers!

I love sketching and painting flowers in any style, and Alisa Burke is always a lot of inspiration for flowers and doodles and whatsoever! Her work and her blog just makes me happy!