On My Work Table

I mentioned on my Art of PerfectShun facebook page before that I wanted to work through Strathmore's Online Workshop #3 on watercolors mainly because watercolors are not my forte.
As of 29 August, Lesson #1 is up and she covers creating a color wheel for the painting, doing color washes and then creating your first painting with her. What a great teaching style Gay Kraeger has - very easy to follow along! I'm guessing Lesson 2 goes up tomorrow, Friday, 5 September.

Anyway, I wasn't quite sure WHY I needed to practice doing color washes, what I was looking for, or how many I should do. So after a little research I found this and thought it was extremely informative and helpful. Maybe you will too.

7 Watercolor Painting Techniques Every Artist Should Know
Oh...the answer is you are trying to produce an even layer of paint, while covering a broad a broad surface. NO lines of overlapping color. Cool. Got it.
Now to master it!

Mandala Respite

Just two sweet little hand drawn and water colored mandala I painted last night waiting for Randy to come home from class.

Ginkgo

background is acrylic wash with hand made stamp block over top

Leaves are acrylic and pen

This one is a possibility for a canvas. What are your thoughts on that? Is this the type of art you would hang in your house? Would you choose other colors for the background? 

No Zending in Sight

No Zending in Sight, originally uploaded by Trish Nonaka.

In the mood to CREATE...wait...create....wait...

I decided to do some art work this morning and began by scanning and printing some of my original work to use in a nifty crafty project idea I saw on alisa burke's blog. (specifically the garland)
So I thought I would use my Silhouette to cut my circles since my largest circle punch is only 1" and I wanted them larger. Then I realized I had not installed the program to my new laptop which I have had for how many months now? Okay. So install software. YAY! Wait! WHAT? Only 50 images? Arrrggg...need to reload all 12K images for the second time. SIGH.
Decide to write blog entry while waiting. 4K downloaded. Decide to talk to daughter. Return to blog entry. 6K done. Begin to lose interest in nifty crafty project idea. Drink coffee. Wait. Wait. Wait. 7K. This is aggravating to someone who wants to CREATE SOMETHING RIGHT NOW.

12 minutes later. Added a change to a watercolor to hang above my desk. I had the van Gogh quote, "The more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." on the painting but it was really difficult to read so I rewrote it on white paper and added it. Much better.
10K.

30 seconds......
TADA!!!
Now to cut circles.

Box of Happiness

Went by Ben Franklin's yesterday and found this lovely little gem that begged to come home with me. How could I say no? Things like this can be challenging to find here (I live on an island) and shipping to here often makes it ridiculous to shop online so I was thrilled to find it at long last!

Wild and Precious

Wild and Precious, originally uploaded by Trish Nonaka.

I love this quote from Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" and decided to create a little piece to put up in my studio. Done on block watercolor 140# paper, it also has a layer of Glimmer Mist over it. Font is Ali's Hand, and I added an old rub-on I had lying around.