Less is more....

#myrockpaperart #lessismore #watercolorpainting #selftaughtartist

As I am now living in a new location I have yet to find an outlet, be it a retail store that supports local artists by giving them a little shelf space or an artist market where I can set up a booth. There are so many markets around Edmonton that I'm going to have to spend some time visiting them as they come up to see which location I feel would suite me best. In the meantime, I am trying not to create more greeting cards etc. as I have limited space for them. But I still want to create, although I admit to being stymied now.  I don’t know if there was just something about where I lived in Mexico that brought out the artist in me or what but I’m not feeling the urge to create nearly as much up here. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have an outlet for my work, so I don’t feel the need however I still want to learn and improve. My main passion while in Mexico was working with sea glass but I no longer have that option so I am going to spend more time and creativity with watercolor painting at the moment. 
 
I am so thankful to paint9art.com for her willingness to share ideas for others to work with and an explanation of how she creates these images. She also sometimes explains where her head is at while creating.  Her creations cover a variety of topics such as cute little houses, another thing that interests me.
 
Right now, I’m fixated with her minimalist creations. She has a lot of ideas to follow along with and recreate so I’ve been trying to expand my horizons. She does a lot with allowing the water just to flow and I have started to experiment with that. I have so far only used one type of the watercolor paints, the images here were done using my watercolor pencils. Now what I want to do is to use my tube watercolor and my pan watercolor paints to see how well they flow across the paper. I do know that even with each type of paint the flow or spread of them often is affected by the pigments in each color so it will be interesting to see which paints/colors give me that lovely flowing effect I'm hoping to achieve.
 
The creations on the left were done while I was traveling so I was using my little watercolor paper block and used just ½ the page per image therefore each image is 4x4 inches. It’s a great little creation size to use while traveling but now that I’m home I’ll be working with bigger paper but again I want to be mindful of my storage area so I’m taking my 9x12 inch sheet and dividing into 4 so I’ll have 4.5x6 inch images. This will be a great way for me to continue practicing and keep them in a book so as to not take up a lot of space. The fun thing with that is I will keep the book on my bookshelf and be able to look back at my practice work and show it to others.

​I’m also interested in improving in another watercolor experience. I always love the simple, clean artwork that others post and share. I especially like the flowers I see that people paint where they leave a lot of white space in the flower petals – that is a big challenge for me to do, just leave it, don’t fill it in with paint!  

Always learning and trying new things and always so grateful to other artists who are willing to share their techniques and allow us to learn by copying them.

---