I did a lot of painting this summer - mostly watercolours - which is a first for me. I started doing some acrylics last year, but always found watercolours to be frustrating because you can't really fix mistakes. When we went to Newfoundland in July, my mother and I packed our little paint boxes and a pad of watercolour paper and we painted most evenings. In the process of filling up my watercolour book and creating a fun memento, I learned to love doing watercolours.
The little paint box with a collapsible brush is so portable that I didn't mind taking it with me and it gave me a way to capture the beautiful scenes we were seeing every day. One of things I love the most about painting is how it makes you focus on details you wouldn't notice otherwise - how the shadows fall, all the colours in the rocks, the different greens and browns in the vegetation ... Every evening I would look through the photos I had taken that day and paint one or two of them. I have posted a few favourites below.
Recently a friend and I went to the cottage to spend some time practicing painting sky and water because boy is it difficult. We were very fortunate to have a fantastic display of different types of clouds and water textures. I took photos on my iPad so we could paint from the pictures and ended up with a wonderful collection in just two days. I uploaded them to the computer so the quality is not as crisp as with my camera, but that just means they have a painterly quality to them already.
We had dark and looming clouds
and light and fluffy clouds
and wispy clouds
and a blue sky with just a few little cotton puff balls
and even for a short period of time early on one of the mornings a pure blue sky.
The water ranged from ruffled
that was insanely sparkly at times
to soft undulations
to a smooth glassy surface which allowed for great reflections of trees and clouds
to an absolutely smooth mirror-like surface.
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