Abstract Watercolour - Taking the Pressure Off
Splish splash, I'ma makin' a mess!
Welcome (back) to The Stress Less Pencil. I'm Lorena, and I believe art is for everyone - everyone's an artist, including you! Stick around if you want to invite a bit more creativity into your life, no matter whether you think you can draw, or not.
Hi friends, I hope you've all been amazing!
After a little creative break, I'm back today to talk to you about having fun with watercolours!
This is a long post because of all the images, so if it appears cut off in your inbox, make sure to click “view entire message” to see it in it's full glory.
The thing is, I don't paint with watercolours very much. It's all so watery and transparent, and a little unpredictable. I much prefer the bold thick colours of a good acrylic that I can layer on top of each other other. So I haven't really fallen in love with the process of painting with watercolours (yet).
BUT! I absolutely love watercolours as an art supply. Watercolour palettes are extremely beautiful objects. There are so many different varieties, from the very tiny miniature palettes to the ginourmous 100+ colour DIY tin palettes.
Just look at how cute this is:
And this, in all it's epic rainbowy glory:
What would I do with this many colours? No idea, just look at them and smile probably.
Last night, I straight up spent 48 minutes watching an artist on YouTube review all her travel watercolour palettes. Move over, Netflix!
In short, I love watercolour palettes more than I love using them. But I want to change that.
A few years ago when visiting my parents, I found an unused set of watercolours that belonged to my Dad. He was quite the painter back in the day, but hasn't touched a paintbrush in a long time, unfortunately. This was evident in this beautiful palette, that just sat there in a drawer for - according to my Dad - around 25 years, the paints still wrapped and completely unused.
Naturally, I had to adopt the poor neglected baby. I opened the paints, swatched them, did one drawing with them, and since then they've been lying on my desk, once again unused.
Until today!
Inspired by my binge watching, I decided to bring out my palette to see if the two of us couldn't manage to have some fun together. One way I invite people to play during my workshops here in Gothenburg is to go abstract.
Just fill the page with colours and shapes, and follow your instincts. Nothing needs to look like anything, whatever happens happens. Throw it out, if you don't like it.
But first, some Inspiration
Here are some classic and contemporary artists that are using watercolour in a way that I really enjoy. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of amazing artists that can do incredible things with watercolours, from beautiful landscapes to realistic portraits. But the style in the following examples just really speak to me.
I've been a fan of Emil Nolde's for a long time, I even dedicated a blog post to him on my old Bullet Journalling website back in the day. He was part of the German Expressionists of the early 1900s. The whole gang of expressionists is known for using really bright and bold colours, which I adore.
Nolde created some amazing abstract, positively dramatic, and definitely popping watercolour landscapes.
Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of abstract watercolour paintings out there. But here is a selection of works I loved from the Gram (artist's usernames are in the screenshots, if you want to explore more of their work)
I also love Kristy Rice's method of "crazy swatching”, which is great as a swatching method, but also produces beautiful results:
My Examples
Full of inspiration, I went at it!
I first had a go at an intuitive abstract painting, which is a fancy-pants way of saying I just kept adding colours and layers until it felt right.
It took a while to get used to playing with different opacities. The first layer was pretty thin, and I kept wishing I just had some pink acrylic to make it go boom. But I kept at it and eventually really enjoyed tickling out the different layers, colours, and structures.
Next, I wanted to do a super wet-on-wet painting. I pretty much soaked the whole page in water and then added colours with a big wet brush, so that the paints could freely flow around, into each other, and do their amazing organic watercolour magic thing.
Inspired by Nolde, and my forever hero Bob Ross, I was aiming for a nature landscape kind of look. I started with some warm colours for the sky, let them dry, and then followed with some blues in the middle, and greens and yellows in the foreground.
There was not much to control here, and I loved it.
And lastly, to give all the other colours in my palette (looking at you, brown) a chance to shine, too, I tried Kristy Rice's messy swatching.
I enjoyed all of this very much. And I really learned a lot about my watercolours, how they interact with water, and with each other.
I'll try to give them more attention in the future…. and then I'll get to go buy ALL THE PALETTES, RIGHT?! 😂
Have a colourful week my friends!
Love, Lorena