Art Update April 2022

I had something slightly different on my drawing board for 2022. It is a mixed media painting, consisting of watercolour, pastel and coloured pencil.

This is a one-off piece – It’s my childhood home where my grandparents lived. I spent many many happy years here, it was always my safe place. I loved it!

My nan passed in 2018 and my grandad passed in 2020, so the house had to finally be sold. I still had my house keys attached to my car keys and I just could not bring myself to remove them.

I wanted to keep them so I decided to do a drawing of the house to remind myself of all those happy times. I have incorporated the keys into the mount along with the lovely quote “A house is made of wood and stone but only love can make a home”

My original idea for this piece was watercolor and coloured pencils on pastelmat paper – in hindsight, I should have tried it out on a test piece before, but in my excitement, I just jumped straight in – lesson learned!

Clairefontaine does say you can use watercolor on their pastelmat paper to create backgrounds and they are correct, however, I quickly discovered they mean the whole background!

I tried to do just the sky and the paper was extremely absorbent which meant the colour would bleed into areas that had no water and where I didn’t want it to do, as you can see below. So I had to abandon the watercolor idea very quickly!

However all was not lost, I managed to save it using pastels I lifted out as much of the watercolour as I could that had run into the roof area and found that pastel covered over it but better than coloured pencil alone.

I must say I am enjoying doing something different and I am being forced to think outside the box

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