Workshop reflections 2: Australian Natives in watercolour and ink
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 organic and I felt somewhat more in touch with the images when I was drawing with something natural.
On day 3 we explored an inkless watercolour technique, utilizing the white space on the page to create distinction between shapes.
This one was very tricky because its so busy and I had to balance the delicate white stems of the flower against the white spacing of the paper. I might continue working on it, I'm not sure it's resolved yet.