Summer Painting

I did a lot of painting this summer - mostly watercolours - which is a first for me. I started doing some acrylics last year, but always found watercolours to be frustrating because you can't really fix mistakes. When we went to Newfoundland in July, my mother and I packed our little paint boxes and a pad of watercolour paper and we painted most evenings. In the process of filling up my watercolour book and creating a fun memento, I learned to love doing watercolours. 

The little paint box with a collapsible brush is so portable that I didn't mind taking it with me and it gave me a way to capture the beautiful scenes we were seeing every day. One of things I love the most about painting is how it makes you focus on details you wouldn't notice otherwise - how the shadows fall, all the colours in the rocks, the different greens and browns in the vegetation ... Every evening I would look through the photos I had taken that day and paint one or two of them. I have posted a few favourites below. 

 

 

 

Recently a friend and I went to the cottage to spend some time practicing painting sky and water because boy is it difficult. We were very fortunate to have a fantastic display of different types of clouds and water textures.  I took photos on my iPad so we could paint from the pictures and ended up with a wonderful collection in just two days. I uploaded them to the computer so the quality is not as crisp as with my camera, but that just means they have a painterly quality to them already. 

We had dark and looming clouds

and light and fluffy clouds

  
and wispy clouds

  

and a blue sky with just a few little cotton puff balls 

and even for a short period of time early on one of the mornings a pure blue sky.

The water ranged from ruffled

that was insanely sparkly at times

to soft undulations

to a smooth glassy surface which allowed for great reflections of trees and clouds

   

  

 to an absolutely smooth mirror-like surface.

I can't say my paintings were out of this world, but I learned a lot.  Namely, that clouds and water are hard to paint. Ha!