I was still looking at Jo Sonja's "The New Rosemaling Primer", and thought I would use this page as my starting point.
This is a particularly soft style of Rosemaling, utilising a dry brushing technique.
So out came my sheet of painted paper, masking taped to a board.
Again, my aim here was not to paint a 'picture', but to try out styles without having to worry about outcomes.
Aim - have fun (and maybe learn something in the process).
When you are working on something new, your mind is concerned with technique, which usually results in your working looking more laboured, maybe stilted, if you know what I mean.
So give yourself the freedom to play.
The bit on the left is slightly more complete than the bit on the right - my brain had been through enough by this stage. And this is where this will stop. It will go into a folder, and I can look back on it and, hopefully, see progress in time to come.
That was a few days ago.
Today, my aim was to take what I'd been learning and develop it in a different direction.
So I basepainted a cheap canvas I had on the shelf, put out some paints and brushes, and just started painting. I had no idea at this stage where it was going.
The colours weren't too difficult to decide upon, as Norwegian folk art has a sort of limited colour palette.
I had been reading Sigmund Aarseth's book, and his style is quite liberated, and a bit abstracted at times. He calls it 'dancing with the brush'.
I liked that idea, so tried to keep it really loose and 'moving'.
This is the result.
Now, those canvas boards are quite textured compared to the surfaces we folk artists are used to, so I needed to use brushes to suit. These are the ones I used, mostly cheap bristle brushes, which are great for dealing with the textured surface.
And this is the palette I used. Except that I only used about half of these colours. I didn't end up going with the yellow, as it clashed with the background colour (which was Raindrop).
Provincial Beige became my yellow.
While I realise there is a long way for me to go in developing this style, I was really happy with the 'movement' in the design. I feel it is quite loose, which is what I was after.
I hope I have encouraged you to spend some time working on new techniques, or old ones, just for the sake of having fun and creating a record to look back on.
Till next time
Fiona
