Beacause I’m a highly peculiar person, I got terribly excited.

So I picked a rock.

Of which I planned to make 30 studies.

You can pretty much guess what happened.

These are all of the same rock we had to paint last time in the still-life. Different angles, obviously.The large one I did on another session, on purpose, for I had my frustration threshold sufficiently broken. Lord a small thing can be difficult!

On the side I started a white seashell, but that one I’ll show you when we get to the session on which I finished it.

This second watercolour painting lesson the assignment was to paint a fairly complex still-life (= several objects of different qualities). Because I had no real plans as to what I wanted to do (and the crow I drooled over the first time seemed too difficult to attempt), I did as I was told.

I must say that it’s rare experience to feel as desperate as I did this time. I hate green and of course the still-life was full of it. I liked the vibrancy of the colours but I couldn’t translate that on the paper. I fully screwed up the base washes. Small things like that.

Also I was very annoyed at myself. WHY do I have to draw with brushes, why? Maybe I do have brushes that are too small (and following this logic I since went and spent over 100 euros on watercolour brushes on one go).

Well, you can’t hit it every time. Not even the every tenth you wish with watercolours. I’m a long way off from professional.

As if that wasn’t enough, our second assignment was to try out watercolour painting with the classroom palettes. Wouldn’t have ever believed the scariest words in the last sentence could turn out to be “the classroom palette”.

I’m not sure if you English speakers out there know what I mean. Out here the classroom palette consists of six or nine basic colours (the six are yellow, red and blue each in warm and cold tone and in the nine the extras usually are green, white and black though it varies) which may or may not give out some colour. The classroom palette is the bane of every kid’s existence and ruins every potentially remarkable watercolour artist faster than you can say “the previous dork didn’t wash these”.

Being the supercilious git I am, I thought that since I can survive easily with three colours in my oil painting, how hard can it be. Famous last words as you might know. I seriously overestimated my skills.

Luckily after a slight adjustment period I got hang of it. As you can see from my flower painting, I missed reds quite badly. Partly because of it I got a tad bored (see the purple corner) but despite that, I think it turned out to be an ok experiment seeing that the aim of this was just to have some feel of how watercolours and the materials work in view of our main assignments.

(Sorry for the abysmally bad picture. In real life the top right corner is green etc.)

My idea behind this work was just to try out the range of the basic techniques I could think of in the spot. I think you can clearly see that I am truly lazy. The shapes are really off and don’t even mention the so-called arrangement: didn’t really plan anything, didn’t have ref pictures, didn’t bother to draw anything. Just went with the flow, mainly using negative painting. Don’t even start to wonder what kind of flowers those are. I have no clue. My horticulturist mother must be so proud, not to mention my botanics teacher… (I think they might be some sort of double peony – rose – oriental poppy hybrid.)
And I should think that no art teacher would hold their breath.

Beside that one I did two smaller paintings. The flower thing was something like A4-A3 and these two are roughly the size of postcards.

Both are of my regular lazy-ass variety but let’s not hold that against them. I’m really proud of one little thing: I painted these real quick. Maybe about 3 minutes per piece (+ drying times, of course). In real life these are pretty nice, especially the bluer one.

So, these were my test pieces. As a summary I would like to say:

1. I looooooooooooooooooooooooooove large watercolour brushes.
2. I need aforementioned tool. Despite being skint and extremely tight.
3. I have totally and utterly forgot everything when it comes to the classroom palette.
4. I seriously need to learn how to photograph my stuff with my mobile. That or start to carry a proper camera with me. I’m deeply sorry about the lack of quality and sharpness of the photos.

(WW-posting is and will be a no-show because I haven’t got anything done.)

But on with the show!

This week, on Sunday, was the first meeting of the watercolour course. I was a bit nervous about my skill level but the course seemed alright. I hope I’ll get better as I got some practice under my belt.

I was a bit ambitious and started with painting a pheasant. It was calling me with its bright purple chest during the intro, so really no choice.

(The picture quality is truly horrible and doesn’t really give out the best impression. I have to take a better one later. But in the meantime, enlarge the painting for it to make even the slightest bit of sense.)

I really didn’t pay much attention to the scale so the head is extremely small compared to the body. Mostly on purpose, seriously.

Well, that’s about that. The other thing I got finished is an age-old Arabian painting. I actually thought I had uploaded it to my blog already, but since I hadn’t, and I did some small tweaks to it, I think it is a nice way to bulk up my “This Week’s Finished” posting.

Next week I hope to post several of those “nearly finished” pieces I have lying around.

Luin tässä jokin aikaa sitten eräästä blogista postauksen, jonka ideana oli esitellä kolme omaa työtä, joista ei luopuisi. Postaus oli vastaus jonkun esittämään kysymykseen.

En tiedä mistä tämä tuli mieleeni, mutta pohdin asiaa aamun pimeinä tunteina. Mitkä kolme työtäni pitäisin?

Tulos oli aika yllättävä siihen nähden, että en ole kokenut tehneeni juuri mitään hienoa sitten vuoden 2006.

Keksin kaksi.

Caramel Star, vesiväri paperille A5, 2010.
Frosty Beauty, vesiväri paperille A6, 2010.

Hassua sinänsä, että en tosiaan koe osaavani työskennellä vesiväreillä ja aloitin niiden kanssa vasta viime vuonna — nämä työt ovat ihan ensimmäisiä!

Miksi sitten valitsisin nämä? En oikeastaan osaa sanoa. Pidän tunnelmasta ja tietyllä tapaa värien herkkyydestä. Molempien kuvien mallit ovat persoonallisuuksia, joiden kanssa on saanut rentoutua, pelätä, unelmoida ja onnistua. Muistot ehkä ovatkin näissä töissä se juttu, joka nostaa taiteellisetkin ansiot vähän paremmalle tasolle.

Molemmat työt ovat myös pieniä ja siis helppoja säilyttää sekä kuljettaa ja pitää esillä.

Ja omana syynään ehkä voi vielä lisätä sen, että tällä hetkellä nämä nyt sitten ehkä puhuttelevat taiteellista näkemystäni — tai jotain yhtä syvällistä! Uskokoon ken haluaa.

Kolmatta työtä en keksinyt. Minulle oikeastaan mieleen tuli erityisesti kolme vaihtoehtoa, jotka voisivat paikan ansaita: kaksi öljymaalausta (2010, 2010) ja yksi akryylimaalaus (2010). Huolestuttavaa.

(Huomautan, että en huomioinut digimaalauksia lainkaan. Niiden huomioiminen tuskin olisi tilannetta juuri muuttanut, ehkä nostanut kolmanteen sijaan kamppailemaan lempityöni vuodelta 2006.)