Water Colour – Page 15 – The Consulting Artist

Learning to Paint – Spring Magnolia

Keira and I were walking home from school yesterday and we noticed how blue the sky was, and how many magnolias are in flower just now.

Keira and I were walking home from school yesterday and we noticed how blue the sky was, and how many magnolias are in flower just now. When we got home I had a go at trying to capture the hints of pink and mauve in the magnolia flower, and combine it with the very blue sky. I’ve tried to use a little white space to indicate where the edges of the leaves might be. Importantly I made no attempt to try and capture realism, just a thought of what we’d seen and talked about. There’s something about this picture I quite like – I hope you find something in it to enjoy too.

Learning to Paint – Bad Day at the Office

A thoroughly underwhelming day with the paintbrush today. I had plans to spend most of the day painting and started out trying to paint a flower which had bloomed early alongside some of its neighbours, which have yet to follow suit. I put some background in and was going to put a blue wash over the picture before deciding it was so bad, adding more would be a waste of time. The flower in the middle is particularly unappealing.

I then had a little play with trying some leaf shapes around the edges then had one more go at the flower on its own on a separate piece of paper. Nothing seemed to go right today so I knocked painting on the head and cut the grass instead!

Learning to Paint – The Apple Has Landed

I painted an apple. It floated in the middle of nowhere. The following day I went back and added some shadow and a surface for the apple to sit on. The apple has landed. This is the first time I’ve gone back to a sketch to improve and add to it. Having let stage one dry it made working on stage two much easier as the colours weren’t running into each other so much.