A Watercolour Birthday

Hello all, and welcome.  I'm celebrating my 50th birthday today - a watershed event for some, but I'd rather make it a watercolour one!  So while I'm enjoying cake and presents (hopefully!), here at Words & Pictures I'm offering up a taste of the many shades of watercolours that I've been enjoying playing with lately.

From lots of colour mixing - a great learning process, and a beautiful, meditative thing to do when inspiration is absent - to attempts to capture some of my much-loved wildflowers, via lots of florals and landscapes and leaves and trees, I've been having so much fun exploring and experimenting.

When I was working in New York recently, I found it easier to grab the watercolours for a quick half hour of play at the end of the day (sometimes midnight) than to dig into the complexities of mixed media and stamps and papers.  And on the single day off each week, that simple paint/water process was mostly what I found myself wanting to do too.

Since I got home, the urge has continued, so I've carried on - with a little bit of regular crafting in between.  Even what you see here is really just the tip of a larger iceberg!  (You can click on any of the photos for a closer look, of course - but remember some of them are very tiny to start with!)

In fact, it would end up being a very long post if I shared all of my experiments and discoveries at once, so I'm just sticking to a few peeks today.  Some time soon I hope to share them in more detail, maybe in a series of themed posts, but for now I hope you enjoy these tasters of what's been going on behind the scenes.

I've been enjoying both the lovely loose spontaneity of pigment and water playing on the paper, as well as discovering ways to control that flow, layering glazes and working in much finer detail with sometimes some white pen or dipping pen + walnut ink work over the top.

These are all shapes and sizes - there are doodlings and jottings; some paintings are whole sides of A4, and some are half that, or a quarter of A4 size, so four paintings to a sheet (one of which you saw at the end of the recent Need for Neutrals post). 

I hope that whets your appetite to see some more.  Explorations continue almost daily, so I'm learning lots as I go, and I can't think of a better way to spend the next fifty (?!) years than on a lovely steep creative learning curve... that's what makes life fun for me.

Saving the best (or at least some of my favourites) for last... and here we are back at the brown and blue, the meadow flowers and grasses.  It'll be no surprise to the regulars here that I definitely found my happy place with this trio.

I'm also celebrating my half century with a triple helping of quotes, just like in the early days here at Words & Pictures... including one from the man who is my other creative obsession.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.  Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you again soon.

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.
William Barclay

I decided if you're lucky enough to be alive, you should use each birthday to celebrate what your life is about.
Mary Steenburgen

With mirth and laughter, let old wrinkles come.
William Shakespeare