Starting Somewhere

Hello lovelies,

many of you will know of my affection for this book...........

 My copy was picked up in a charity shop and I've often shared it's beautiful watercolour illustrations here..........

A few weeks ago Mum passed this book on to me, it had been given to her by a neighbour and belonged to his late mother..........

It's by an Artist I hadn't heard of before called Jill Bays.

I loved the colourful and flamboyant paintings of garden plants..............

Pretty scenes............

and wild flower studies..........

It made me think maybe I should give watercolour painting a try. I knew it would be tricky, I've virtually no experience of this hobby. But my drawing confidence has grown since that first coloured pencil picture last FEBRUARY. 

And you have to start somewhere, right? 

The landscape around here is looking so lovely right now I decided to base my first attempt on this photo, it's from last week's walk.................

I hope you lovelies are not expecting too much :0)

It's a much different experience than my usual easily controlled drawing. I was just guessing what to do really, mixing colours is a new thing and so is dealing with wet paint.

But despite all the mistakes and guesswork I ended up with something that's not too awful. In fact I kind of like it..........

It was fun to do and I liked the way I just went with a simple drawing and didn't obsess to much over the details. I love the intense colours you can easily achieve and the whole thing took me less than an hour to do.

The field looks like it's full of Poppies, rather than Knapweed. I mixed the wrong colour and made them too big, but I'm not letting that bother me.

Any hobby is about leaning new skills and having fun I think.....so that's what I'll be focusing on with this one.
Jacquie x