All week about nature.

All my work this week has been related to nature.

We kept on weeding last weekend, and luckily we're almost finished. Just one more flowerbed remains, but the rain came and now it has to dry up a bit.

All year around we have magpies in our garden. I think they are bautiful birds dressed in white tie and tails. They always seems so happy except when they're arguing.
This week we've had four or five of them in the garden and they got me thinking of my paternal grandma. She was born in 1891, and she didn't like the magpies at all. It was something old I believe, about the magpies came just for stealing.

The funniest thing she said  though, was that if one had magpies in the garden and they became noisy, one would have visitors to the home before the day ended. My grandma had lots of storys to tell, she died in 1995, 104 years old.

I made some other birds as well this week. I saw the idea over at  Stefanie's blog and couldn't resist making some.

Cool and happy birds, lovely for decorating and lots of other stuff. I might be back with some ideas later on.

I also tried my hand on making a landscape, using pan pastels. It isn't the worst I've made, but I need alot of practice to be good at it.

It's made on black paper, and I had to add more light to it in picasa. Well, that's about it.

Happy Friday Sketches and PPF everyone, and thank you for all your lovely comments. It's a thrill to read them all.

What a rainy morning can bring.

I couldn't quite like to paint on black paper in class,

while many of my fellow students were very excited. So the other day I found it was time to do another try. No expectations and no rules, my approach was to let loose and let the imagination and intuition take control.

What an adventure! I found myself both excited and thrilled. I used Clear Tar Gel from Golden to, quite
randomly, make the outlines of my rose. I wanted it to be a loose style rose and concidered it all to be a test. I let the gel dry well before getting on with paint. All my color choices were made by intuition. The reason all the lines are so black is the paper. The gel is clear but shiny, and makes it look like black paint. Have a look at the photo below, can you see it looks like fabric in the background?

With the paint dry, I added pan pastel to the background. One layer of Ultramarine Blue. I spent a long time concidering whether to stop at this stage, but my curiosity won and I added a final layer.

I used different colors of pastels and made lines. I think these lines add movement to my piece, but I'm not sure if this was the best piece to add them to. But, the flower stand out well because of it's shimmer. To use pastels together with Twinks is a fantastic combination. They both accentuate one another well, and it creates lots of  interest.

So far I've learnt many new things and I'm definitely going to do more of this. Suddenly black paper became an interesting substrate for me. Isn't it strang how little it takes to make a big difference?

By the way, can you see that the line work is a little inspired by Van Gogh.
Thanks for stopping by, I hope you've enjoyed your visit.

Pan-pastels.



 

I bought myself pan-pastels while in the US.

 

Today I tried them for the first time. Easy to use, but difficult too. I think I have to make myself a face stencil, it's not nice to see all the pencil lines. I have to practice alot too, but I liked them. Isn't it strange how helpless one can feel when using new tools? Perhaps I should practice painting without drawing first but it's so difficult, I feel. And shadowing......I have alot to learn.

 

The other night I was surfing the internet and came across some tempting watercolor pencils too. Well, I'll have to think about it for awhile, meaningless to buy and buy and not use them. Right now I'm more up to reading  than anything else, but I have alot of things I'll try later on. 

 

I did this face rather quick, and ended my work even without coloring the neck. It was just meant as a test and I saw many things to do different. A good learningpiece.