The challenge was to paint straight onto the paper with no preparatory pencil marks. Holy cow! Was I crazy? I was inspired by the wonderfully loose watercolour paintings of Jean Haines, but I discovered that I am way too detail orientated to achieve that style on the first try. My brain hurt after several hours of intense painting. All those negative shapes between the stems of the florets really challenged my hand-eye coordination and it was a relief to finally put down the brushes.
I have a tumbleweed at home – just waiting for my next bout of masochism.
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Salt effect might work quite well for tumble weed. Have a look at Jane Minter’s pieces on this blog. (onehundredwashes.blogspot.com). Very effective.
Its quite refreshing to be able to fess up to our ‘paintings for the bin’ sometimes.
I have a very big pile of them.
cool – will do. Think I just need to do some loose wash exercises before I look at painting something specific. New challenges from my author means I am going to be back doing very realistic, very controlled stuff, so need to achieve a bit of balance by messing around with unformed paint : )