Hibiscus - floral watercolor

I took a reference picture of this blue pot with a  yellow hibiscus, that I wanted to paint . 

I really enjoyed the painting session with bright colors - and I chose to add red for more contrast - as the original flowers were onlyt yellow . Unfortunately the photo doesn't  show the intense yellow - looked ok on my phone but not on the pc!

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!

Watercolor landscape workshop!

I had a lovely weekend recently, painting in good company and experimenting new technics,   participating at a workshop by the Swedish artist Björn Bernström. It was very inspiring and liberating with new approaches, and especially fun to look for special effects - like 'cauliflowers' - that traditionally are considered errors!

Here, as in the first picture, we were using burnt umber creating staining effects...

A more traditional painting, or actually two in one!! 

Exploring wet-in-wet and new colors, more than aiming for finished paintings.

                              

                                                          They look better separated! 

                                       Here the transparent and delicate colors show a little better...

Mixed Media Sketching Tuesday!

Last week I had a wonderful afternoon, drinking tea and sketching and painting with my friends!
I was supposed to stop by just for a while, and didn't bring much material with me, only and old book and some white gouache. While chatting and sipping on the tea, I started to partially cover  the book pages with the white paint... I really didn't have any idea of what I was going to do...

 Since I didn't have any watercolors with me I then used the different teas on the paper for some abstract designs for warming up, and finished with some watercolor pencils...

Now I was inspired enough to end up with some small and loose mixed media sketches of coffee and tea cups! I really enjoyed improvisating and sketching in good company, and I was quite happy with the result as well, even if these are no traditional watercolor paintings -  what do you think?!

Caffè espresso!

I have been really busy lately, and had a hard time to find time to paint. Luckily I always get so inspired by Lela's blog Paint and Draw Together -link  here ! This time I didn't paint the suggested picture, but was inspired to paint all my different cups of espresso coffee!

This was absolutely fun - first of all, usually I do much larger paintings, (except for my recent small landscapes) while these are small, like the real cups. This means they were very fast  to paint, which was important these days. 

As you see, on some of these sketches I added some details in carbon or pencil. 

I really think I'll work more with this subject, I have some cups with pattern as well...

This was the first sketch, and actually the one I like most, I think it's more fresh and expressive than the others. This happens often, since when I sketch I feel free, while when I start a 'real' painting I maybe try too hard!? Does this happen to you as well?