Watercolor Oh My

 My Spring juices are flowing and I'm definitely in the mood for trying new things.  New Season....New Craft.  So I'm jumping out of my comfort zone and running right into watercolor.  Oh my what am I thinking?  Have you ever been cruising through Pinterest and seen something and said to yourself..."I can do that"?  Yep!!!  That's me!  ALL THE TIME!!!  I have this "take the idea and run with it" mentality.  I go all in!  I buy everything I think I need as well as things I probably don't need but might need someday if I get really good at the new endeavor.  So this time it's watercolor.  Paint a picture.  I don't spend days or weeks learning techniques or whether I should buy/use cake colors or tube colors.  Or whether to buy mid priced or high priced brush's and never mind figuring out what paper to buy.  Hot press/cold press.  I just run into Michaels and buy everything so I'm prepared.  I drive my husband nuts.  I have to admit I drive my self nuts too when I find out I don't like the new craft that I just spent mega bucks on lol.

 Ok now for the truth.............above is what I always do.  But this time....well I lucked out because my husband does watercolors.  So I have a ton of stuff at my disposal and I do not need to buy a thing.  He also has not done any watercolors in years, so all this stuff has been just sitting around in a large plastic storage bin.  Guess what?  The paints are still pliable.  Amazing!  He already had a bunch of paper and alot of brushes and paints.  I had a few of those little plastic well dishes to put the colors in (see a painter I am not, I don't even know what those things are called lol) and some old frosting tubs to use as water cups to clean the brushes.  So I did decide this time I would actually look at some super simple ideas and try some on scraps of watercolor paper he had before I go "All In".   I've played around with acrylics and oils and know a little about blending and was quite surprised when I tried to add more color to an area and found that the color was actually lifting off.  Oh boy....I didn't know you could just take a wet brush and go over what color you just put down and take it away.  YIKES!  I need to concentrate.  Is this really going to be relaxing like the videos say? EY YI YI.

So I decided to use my Dylusions Journaling book as my sample pages.  I know they are not watercolor pages, but they are suppose to be multi-medium pages so I figure they should work for practicing.  The easiest thing I found was to try eucalyptus leaves.  Well I thought they'd be easy lol.  Mine just look like greenish circles.  

Ok move on.  How about drops of water, then drop on a color and let it bleed.  Well.....these pages don't allow much in the way of bleeding but I guess it kind of worked.

Well as you can see one of the blobs didn't look like a flower to me so I made it a bird.  Yeah, no clue what kind of bird that is. LOL

So then they also had an exercise where you add some drop like blobs here and there..... then try and make something out of that.  Well.............

Yeah, not lovin' this one at all.  But you know it's practice practice practice.  This journal is probably going to have alot of what I will deem fails in it but that's what discovering art is all about. learning from your fails or even sometimes finding happy accidents.  So every once in a while, I'm going to share my plus's and my fail's as I go on my watercolor adventure.  Don't worry they won't be posted often.  I know I need real time to sit and paint and real time is not always available LOL. 

Now for my final trial attempt.  This time a more deliberate subject.  Birds.

Yes, I deliberately tried to paint a trio of undefined birds.  To me undefined means I did not draw them out on the paper first.  I saw these in a video and the lady made a circle of water on her paper.  She then added one color to the top and another to the bottom and they magically pulled together in the middle and then you add detail.  Like the tail, the beak, feet and eye.  So I played and well.....I don't hate it.  So that's a Plus right?

The other thing that surprised me was that I used the same brush to do the entire thing.  Who knew? Secret here........I think it's a kids watercolor brush from Michaels.  The handle is a clear bright green acrylic, it has green bristles, the handle says Royal.  LOL!  Oh boy Pro watercolor people are cringing I'm sure heeheehee.

Ok well this is a very long post so I'll end now with if I can mess around with a kids brush, kids cake watercolor paints and a multi-media journal book and attempt to watercolor I think anyone can.  So keep checking back on my journey.  I'll bet I'll have alot of ummmmm......(happy accidents?) to share.