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Course reflections 1: Introduction to Watercolour

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After trying out watercolour in a workshop, I knew I wanted more! I found a 6 week watercolour course for beginners and signed up immediately.  Week 1-  We started off with understanding our paints, and creating this handy guide for mixing the cools and warms of the primaries. I referenced this constantly throughout the course. Week 2- Our tutor walked us through how to paint the egg and leaf. I'm so proud of the egg I could eat it. It was fun to jump right into painting. Week 3- Experimenting with what watercolour can do, wet on wet, wet on dry, adding things to manipulate the texture like salt or isopropyl alcohol etc. By the end of the class we all had a bunch of little experiments that we turned into a handy reference book. Watercolour has so much potential! Week 4-  Exploring simple layering to create abstract landscapes. This was really nice, so simple but so effective! I now have many little greeting cards...
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Workshop reflections 2: Australian Natives in watercolour and ink

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This workshop really piqued my interest so I had to attend. It was 4 days of learning expressive techniques to produce beautiful watercolour and ink drawings of Australian native flowers. As of doing this workshop in April, I was really new to watercolour and this was a perfect way to dip my toes (and brush) in. I missed the first day so we'll start from day 2. We were shown demonstrations and tasked to create some single line contour drawings from images of native flowers. The image above is one of my favourites from the whole workshop. Drawn with sharpie then I added watercolour, with instructions to not paint in between the lines! Which created this lovely loose feel, much more visually interesting. This one was a contour drawing with my left hand, this is one of my least favourites but I think its more about the muddy colours. I like how it looks like the flowers are raining down. For the next few, we were given sticks to dip in the ink. The result is quite org...
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Workshop reflections 1: Discover Acrylic Painting

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I've been using Acrylic Paints for at least a decade now and some days I feel like a professional and other days every colour I mix turns into baby poop. I've never been formally taught about painting as I just learned through trial and error, and at this point I'd hit a creative wall.  For a refresher on my skills, I chose the workshop "Discover Acrylic Painting". A 2 day workshop that went over colour mixing, tints & shades, taklon and hoghair brushes, tools, techniques, mediums to thin and thicken, and many experimental exercises. I started again from the basics and it was really informative, after completing the workshop I feel much more confident in my artistic decision making.  Seascape Experiment with Pallette Knives. 30cmx23cm board. Pitcher still life using hoghair brush, texture paste, pallette knives. 23cmx18cm board. Abstraction Experiment using different tools. A2 sized paper. Experiment ...
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My website!

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 My website is live! www.pencilpaintpixie.com
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Brian Froud Pressed Fairy studies 1

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I've been collecting books by Brian Froud for a while now. I adore the pressed fairies series. The illustrations are so fun and silly, it's really fun to study them and get out of my artistic comfort zone. The books are a collection of illustrations of fairies that have been "collected" like pressed flowers by squashing them between the pages. Their anatomy becomes stretched and distorted, creating unique poses that are so fun to draw. I'm sketching on a 40 page A4 sketchbook from the op shop. On a few pages some little kids were playing hangman with words like "skibidi" and "brainrot" but I just used whiteout and sketched over it. I'm challenging myself to finish the whole 40 pages with studies of Brian Froud's work. Mainly focusing on poses and expressions. I'm using a mix of pencil, marker, and highlighters.
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