Another attempt at a mixed media painting Chris Forsey style from his video Pushing The Boundaries of Watercolour. I did try to change it a little from his original by adding a tree stump into the centre of the pond rather than having a large focal tree in the central background but am not that sure that it worked. I used too strong a yellow in the background and the painting in real life looks more like there is a forest fire in the background rather than subtle evening sunlight. I quite like it though and it was fun to paint.
Category Archives: art
Mixed media scene
I love watching Chris Forsey paint, in fact I could watch him paint all day, he can take rather ordinary scenes and fill them with vibrancy and life. Over the last couple of months I have tried different painting techniques using a variety of media. Chris Forsey’s video, Pushing The Boundaries Of Watercolour, shows you how he starts with a couple of sketches or photos and takes you through his thinking process and how he achieves his resulting masterpieces. I have tried to follow a couple of his paintings from start to finish while changing them ever so slightly. I do like my results but still see many mistakes. This was painted using oil pastels, watercolour, and acrylic inks on bamboo paper.
Coast watercolour painting
Here is my latest attempts at a watercolour painting. I was working through Paul Taggart’s lessons and although I did learn a lot I haven’t really done them justice. I am still a bit heavy handed with the paint and my colour mixing needs more practice. There is so much I don’t like about this painting but in doing it I did learn quite a bit and after all I do need the practice. I used bamboo paper just because it was handy and in a gummed block but next time I do watercolour I will use watercolour paper and maybe even stretch it myself as I haven’t tried that yet. Thanks for the lessons Paul.
Simple acrylic floral landscape
Lately I have been dabbling in a variety of techniques in my quest to learn to paint and here is simple floral landscape that I painted using Angela Anderson’s tutorial (who got the idea originally from Yvonne Coomber).
It is dead simple, a bit messy and time consuming but a lot of fun.
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 13) Circles
So here is my last double page and it is where I have put my contents. The contents are in circles and little circles join them all like a chain. Think of cycles and life cycles, some planetary orbits, mushroom rings, ripples from a single rain drop, flower heads, rock formations craters, and many more. Chains of events one leading to another and some branching off. This was mostly acrylic paint and computer generated text.
That was my last page of my little book. I hope you have enjoyed it and I hope it stands up to it’s tour with the Sketchbook project.
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 12) Agate
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 11) Patterns
I have just used random patterns for this page with a few snakeskin type patterns, dots, circles, brain corral (stencil) and wood grain. It didn’t really come out how I had planned it to but hey-ho I wasn’t going to change it. I used spray inks, stamps, clear embossing powder and some acrylic paint.
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 10) Fractals
Of all the beautiful fractal (self – similar) patterns that are out there I chose to do rather a plain page to depict them. I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to draw trees or feathers or rivers or ferns or nerves or mycelium or a thunder bolt or crystals or snowflakes or alveoli or blood vessels or……. …..So I made my trees look a bit like feathers which looked a bit like furrows on a hillside with mountains in the background and I added some ferns and angelica type plants. This page was done using watercolour pencils and a black Pitt pen.
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 9) Shapes
What do footballs and bees have in common? Hexagons. I was thinking about how the same shapes keep cropping up in nature. This page shows the humble hexagon in the bee’s honeycomb and Buckminsterfullerene (truncated icosahedron) or C60 – no I didn’t draw a football. I used acrylics paints mostly and some pencils and oil pastels to add highlights.
Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 8) Annelids
I just love doing this kind of doodle! I was thinking about the fact that earthworms take the dead leaves and make lovely rich compost from them – just another one of natures recyclers. If it wasn’t for nature’s recyclers what would our Earth look like today I wonder? I had gesso-ed the page first but forgot that my water soluble graphite pencils would not blend they way I had wanted them to on that sealed surface so I changed to ordinary graphite pencils and blended them with a paper stump instead Also used a copic multi liner pen and a pink pencil.