Whimsical Flowers

After more than a year, I am back to following Juliette Crane’s on-line courses! Juliette is an artist from Wisconsin, USA whose speciality is whimsical abstract art, and I had the pleasure of attending and completing her Serendipity I classes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to return to her other classes sooner for which I had also signed up due to work commitments and following other artists’ classes. I am now following her 30-part Whimsical Animals classes as I would love to learn more about painting different kinds of animals! Although it is designed for twelve weeks by painting 2-3 times week, we are free to work on our own pace. And here is the first lesson: Letting Go + Creating Painted Pages.

Letting Go

With every course comes a warm up. I used sketchbooks for this one, namely Strathmore’s Visual Journal for Mixed Media (A4 size 300gsm), and scribbled away. Although we go freestyle, I tried to use the mediums as close to as Juliette’s as possible: India Ink in Turquoise, Shiva Oil Paint sticks and black Stabilo marking pencil to name a few. The rest I went for iridescent yellow India Ink, Magenta acrylic ink and fluorescent pink paint pen. My first loosen-up session:

Now that’s a great start. Looks like a child’s drawing but that’s the whole point. Letting go and getting my inner-child to resurface! And now another practice and getting more the hang of it:

Creating a Painted Page

And after this second practice, I got more confident, less hesitant and bolder in playing with my inks and paints. Just applied them starting from light to dark colors and watched them feather and swirl together. A few others were then introduced, including green and iridescent purple, in addition to some fluorescent shades. I even sprayed a bit of isopropyl alcohol to spread the inks and enhance the feathery appearance. As finishing touch, tiny scrap bits of origami paper were added. How about that!

These are the mediums I selected: On the top half of the photo collage are those used for all the three sessions, whilst those in bottom half are what I later introduced for that third one only. Loving the various fluorescent colored stuff available including watercolors by Korembi and acrylic paints by Holbein!

Although merely a warm up for the entire course, I really loved the way the third one turned out and thought it should be considered a painting worth sharing here! I came to realize though that I had ended up drawing flowers, when this course is actually about Whimsical Animals. Not to fret, the whole point of this exercise was letting go and getting creative…so why not just name it Whimsical Flowers!

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