As I continue re-learning to love making art, I decided to try playing with some watercolors.  I’ve been able to see Emily Garfield paint and she had a watercolor brush pen which looked cool. So I decided to grab one and some paint and give it a try.

My first attempt at watercolor painting was based on having been chopping some asparagus. I saw some water kind of shooting out of it at the moment I chopped it and wanted to capture that.  I found it fun and want to continue trying my hand at watercolors.  It’s certainly different than pastels or drawing with markers.  In some ways it’s more forgiving since if I don’t like the color, I can just add more on top of it, but in others it’s not since I can’t erase and go back to a blank slate.

I just finished making a couple more watercolor paintings that I’m sending as gifts.  This time, I taped the paper down completely so that it didn’t buckle up while wet.  This certainly helped with the final product.

One thing I’ve done to make it easier to paint while not at home that I stole from Emily is to take my tubes of paint and put some in an empty Altoids tin. This means I don’t need to carry around tubes of paint and I have more than enough paint with me to make a couple of paintings.

I like the pen brush a lot so far, but I also think I might pick up some more traditional brushes.  I also doubt that I am going to abandon pastels anytime soon.  It’s a lot of fun to touch my art and really feel like a part of it.  I want to figure out a way to go more multimedia and maybe do a pastel layer with some water colors on top or perhaps a watercolor background with some pastels on top.  I’m going to need to look into that a bit more and do some more playing.