Watercolour and cling film....

I did some experimenting with watercolour and clingfilm and I love the results.

This was my first test playing around (it even has an old 'gone wrong' painting on the back, never throw these as they're great for experimenting on and over).... I love the looseness of it;

Here was my next attempt on Khadi paper which Hazel Sloane swears by and if it's good enough for Hazel it's definitely good enough for me, it was lovely paper to paint on;

I love poppies and have some lovely poppy heads I kept from my garden last year (I hope they come back this year). I also experimented with wax resist on this at different stages and layers. 

I also played around with some teasels. These are my favourite but they did take a little longer....

I then took these along to West Horndon Art Group to show them how to use cling film to create different textures. It's such a lovely group and the time flies by I only wish I had taken some images to show you all. 

Art Group

I love teaching at art groups, they're always full of very nice and talented people. I was asked to show how to paint birch trees using a credit card and salt technique in watercolour. 

I worked on a very traditional version, using the credit card to scrape the paint for the birch trees across the paper then use a natural sponge to paint the background leaves and trees:

But all of the members of the art group wanted to experiment with colour and the wonderful textures you get from salt. So I showed them how to create these:

and here are their wonderful creations. They all look fantastic. (I wish I had my own photographer to get pictures of everyone's work so sorry if I didn't manage to capture your work). 

The main thing I love about teaching is although I show people how to paint a subject matter with the same techniques every bodies work always looks completely different. Everybody brings in their own style, own colour palette and own vision. 

There's still room on my Thursday morning art class.....

It's a lovely class in a lovely location overlooking Hornchurch Country Park. If you want to come and get a little creative with us then just email me at kirsten@iaminspired.co.uk

Palette Knife.....

I love learning new things and going to different classes. I recently signed up to do a class with the  watercolour artist William Newton. I was really disappointed to find out it was cancelled due to personal reasons so I decided to paint myself a painting instead and worked on this little one....

I love it so much I'm going to work on another. I used my palette knife for the flowers which is really fun to use. I did a couple of classes recently showing how to paint with palette knives, it was so therapeutic and fun I recommend it to anyone. 

Watercolour classes.....

I've just finished a 10 week class in watercolours and we're almost ready to start the next one.

Here's some of the paintings that we did in class on the last course. 

We looked at adding shadows to bring our paintings to life:

We experimented with BRUSHO and my first time painting a Kingfisher. 

We played around with a limited palette in our paintings;

We also had a look at pen and ink;

If you fancy joining us the next class starts on Thursday 19th April at Hornchurch Country Park Visitors Centre.