JOLLIETEXTILES

A photo of my seemingly not very limited supplies! This is in preparation for a six month journey around different parts of the UK, while my husband and I search for a house in a coastal area – North Norfolk hopefully! I packed up a box of art materials, focusing on watercolours for ease. I have my White Knights paint box, some Koh-i-Nor dyes and Caran D’Arche crayons, so everything water soluble. I have thrown in some fine liner pens and some Poscas, plus ordinary Quink ink and some walnut ink crystals. Paint brushes, bamboo pen and some wax crayons complete the selection, alongside several smallish sketchbooks with good quality paper.

I thought I would have a lot of time on my hands to do all sorts of art and hoped this would let me spend time experimenting with watercolours, as although I have ‘coloured things in’ with paint before I haven’t ever learnt any proper techniques. So far I have only found time to watch one Youtube video and I’ve deduced already that using watercolours will be very hard! Working quickly is clearly key with this medium and the tutorial I watched involved creating a little watercolour picture of primroses in less than ten minutes. I selected primroses for a subject as they were everywhere in Cornwall, where we began our journey. I tried to follow along with the video, learning about wet on dry and wet on wet, but the artist was so skilled that she made it look very easy when in fact it was super hard. I sprinkled some salt onto the background as suggested, but then it seemed to ‘stick’ to the puddled paint and I couldn’t brush it off afterwards. Plus I hadn’t packed a little pointy brush so couldn’t finish the details finely, so just added a few pencil lines for definition. A long way to go on the watercolour journey…….

Far more enjoyable has been using one of my little sketchbooks for ‘Doodles’. Simply laying down a watercolour background and then added shapes and squiggles and generally creating a page of pattern. Very relaxing too (unlike the tutorial!) with the bonus of being able to do it on my lap. Here are the doodles so far.