Friday, August 2, 2013

(Water) Colour Explosion

It can come as no surprise that I like colour. As much I as I enjoy looking at other people's vintagy stuff or minimalist approaches, at heart I myself am neither. I'm a colour girl all the way. I sometimes wish I wasn't, because I'm always a little jealous of people who can make more 'sedate' calming things. But whenever I try it always feels as if something is missing. The funny part is though that a lot of positive comments on my work are about my use of colour, so perhaps I should just stick with my natural inclinations. ;-)

It can come as no surprise either that I like patterns and colouring in my own doodles. I keep a moleskine sketchbook just for drawing and colouring patterns. Mostly I do this with markers.

But recently I really felt like playing with watercolour. So I got out the big Moleskine watercolour book (about A4 size and also known as the Fodder Book) and got to playing. I first drew a pattern with a hard pencil (4H) and then I coloured it in with my brightest watercolours. Here are the results. You might want to put your sunglasses on! ;-)





For the one with the circles I used a circle template. The rest was drawn by hand. Besides the joy of making them I think the colouring in of shapes with watercolour is really good practice for getting along with your brushes. Trying to colour neatly inside the lines might just help you with your hand eye coordination and teach you to handle your brushes more precisely. I don't know if that's really true, but it feels true. Maybe sometimes it's a good thing to not colour outside the lines, haha.

I had such a good time making these that I doubt they are the last. I swear, if ever the gods of creativity decide to cut down my colour palet to just five choices I will go for yellow, turquoise, orange, apple green and hot pink without any thought. As long as I have those I can get my colour fix! ;-)
You can always see it in my watercolour boxes too, these are the colours that run out the fastest.

Do you have any colours like that? The ones you always turn too when you're doodling or just fooling around? I'd love to know. I hope you do and I hope that you play with them all weekend! Wishing you a wonderful and artsy one!