Cath Sheard Art

Tag: watercolour

  • Crusade #33 – back to school

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    Michelle’s challenge over at the GPP Street Team this month is to learn something new, either in or out of the studio – you can read all about it here. I decided this month I would learn to let go of the results a bit more, and just enjoy the process. In the spirit of going back to school I have been reading about the creative process, about play, and about some new cutting-edge techniques – trying to make my objective an active on. Some of the books I have dipped into have included Nita Leland’s “The new creative artist“, Nancy Reyner’s “Acrylic revolution” and Lisa Cyr’s “Art revolution“.  

    Moving on from reading, I have been playing with looser backgrounds as beginnings to works, collage, enhancing digitally then printing and working further on paper. In the image shown here I photographed a chook in amongst some weeds, made a loose background with texture, collaged the photo on, added some old watercolour painting strips on top, scanned and enhanced digitally. Is it a masterpiece? Not at all. Did I let go off the results and just learn through play? Yes.

    Thanks Michelle – my “back to school” lesson was one I needed to start (re)learning. chook crop

  • My mapping went “awol”

    As you saw a few posts back, I am fascinated with the way modern Aboriginal artists map the land, often from memory. I had a play a week or so back and at the weekend found time to have another shot.It’s not as easy as it looks! Why? Because my brain automatically decides to do “western perspective” landscapes instead, and not very well at that. I think producing something that satisfies my idea of ‘mapping’ the land around me is going to be way more of a learning curve than I had imagined. Bring it on I say…

    In the meantime, here are just four of the many I did at the weekend, all on Fabriano Artistico140lb 5×7″ watercolour paper with Golden Fluid acrylics. It was interesting to see the work got looser and more abstract the longer I had a brush in my hand.

  • NZ Art Guild Challenge – winner, most creative

    The NZ Art Guild runs regular challenges and I try to do all of them as a way of stretching my artistic wings. The most recent challenge was to use one of 5 suggested songs (all by New Zealand musicians) as inspiration for an artwork. Here are the details of my entry:

    Title: My husband, my hero
    Media: watercolour and digital. Watercolour portrait, then hand lettered lyrics in black. Scanned and added semi-transparent white text in my own handwriting font over the top. Size: 10x13cm
    Inspiration: Dreamin’ by Scribe. One of the verses says “And I wouldn’t of made it if it wasn’t for you. You picked me up every time that I fell. When I was going thru hell, you told me that I would prevail“. My husband Tony really is my hero; he uplifts me, he understands my need to shut myself away and do my art, he sticks with me through all lifes up and downs.

    This piece was voted “most creative” entry for the challenge, and got some lovely feedback, with one person saying they could see my love for my husband shining through – I am so glad it shows. Tony, this one really is for you.

    My husband, my hero

  • Bones

    The NZ Art Guild challenge that finished a week or so ago started with a photograph of some bones. We could do anything we liked, and boy, did I like. Here’s the details of the two works I produced for the challenge.

    Original photo ref of bones

    1. Title: I love Anthro Bones #1.  Medium: Fluid acrylic on cream colourfix paper, 9×11.5″
    Inspiration: I knew straight away there were amazing hearts in the bones so I took the photo down to stencil setting in photoshop to simplify the edges and make the hearts shapes stand out.

    anthro bones 1

    2. Title: I love Anthro Bones #2. Medium: Watercolour, gel pen and oil pastels on Daler-Rowney 300gsm rough watercolour paper, 8.5×11.5″
    Inspiration: In photoshopping the image to stencil to see the hearts betters, I decided the image needed some “bling” so I used white gel pen and neon colours to give the heart of the bones some sparkle.

    anthro bones 2

  • Wonderful gift from Jeanette Jobson

    When Watermarks first started I visited all the contributing artists blogs, including Jeanette Jobson at Illustrated Life.  Watermarks is a small community of artists who make art from water. They all sketch, draw and/or paint water – the sea, the coastline, beaches, rivers, streams, waterfalls, fountains – in all contexts, styles, genres and media.

    Anyway, just by commenting on one of Jeanette’s post on her blog, I won a watercolour portrait done by her. How generous is that? Boy, was I excited!  With Mum’s 85th birthday coming up I decided it would be great to have Jeanette paint a portrait of Mum, so I emailed off some photos.

    Guess what turned up in the mail yesterday, all the way from Newfoundland? Not one, but two beautiful watercolour portraits of Mum. (my scans are not doing the work justice, sorry about that, can’t seem to fix) So now I am even more excited, because it means I can give one to Mum and one to my sister Ailsa.

    Jeanette is a generous and talented artist; I am thrilled to have some of her work way down here in New Zealand.

    Watercolour portrait of Pam Barker by Jeanette Jobson
    Watercolour portrait of Pam Barker by Jeanette Jobson
    Portrait of Mum by Jeanette Jobson
    Portrait of Mum by Jeanette Jobson