Saturday 14 February 2015

Having a play with Hydrus watercolours

I was at the local art club yesterday and the subject was waves/water. I can't do my normal acrylic ink paintings at the club, as we are only there for the morning and the inks take absolutely ages to dry (normally overnight) and I have to transport it back home by car.... So I thought about Dr Ph Martin's Hydrus Fine Art Watercolours I have. I haven't really used them much because they dry too quickly for my normal technique - so maybe this was the answer here....

Anyway, had a morning playing around with them, throwing the medium at the page (thank goodness I use thick watercolour paper - 425gsm Bockingford NOT - so not too much buckling!) Not really a finished painting, but it shows that there is definitely potential in these - great when travelling as they are in neat bottles, dry quickly and still give me the vibrancy I need.

Being watercolour based, rather than acrylic, they don't flow in quite the same way (ie they are absorbed by the paper more quickly) but as long as you keep the paper tilted a bit to encourage dribbles and add more clean water to aid flow, you can get some great marks. Obviously masking fluid and salt etc work beautifully with this medium - it is basically just intense liquid watercolour. The only shame is that I have a limited selection of Hydrus colours compared to the acrylic inks. I bought all that were available at the time - just gone online to find that they now have 36 colours! Going to have to investigate this further, as I am sure a few more colours will help.....

This. So much this.OK - having just made that last comment brought to mind something I posted on Facebook recently - think this applies to me! I am hopeless in an art shop - but then I do like to experiment with mixed media and so trying new products can often mean coming up with exciting results...







Friday 6 February 2015

Website up and running

I apologise for not posting for absolutely ages. After the exhibition and fair in November family stuff took over and haven't really had time to paint. However, getting my act together now and have been upstairs starting some work.

The other thing that I have done is set up a website for my art. This obviously takes a while, but it is now up and running. I will keep the blog going for progress on the art and all the normal stuff I put on, but the website is there to show my finished work/forthcoming exhibitions etc. If anyone is interested, you can find the website via the following link: Lynn Norton website

I have also added a "Links" section on the right of this page. This contains links to my website, my Twitter account and also my Pinterest page.

I will post some more work here soon....