More doodle painting....

 

I've had this Marjolein Bastin book for many, many years.  Every few years I get it out and drool over it.
Sometimes I even get out my watercolour paints and 'doodle' from some of the pages.

 

 

 

It takes me back to childhood in Scotland.

 

One of the favourite activities of my sister and I was to ramble through woods and down country lanes on nature walks - seeing what treasures we could find.

Sycamore pods were a favourite.  We called them helicopters.  We would throw them up in the air and watch them fall to the ground.

 

 

 

 

More fun doodling with more traditional folk art styles.

 

 

And, of course, more folk art houses.

 

 

 

 

And tea........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope you're having a great day,

cheers

Fi

Rustic painting Ompir style....

Weather was a bit hot today, so after a bit of lunch up at the Robertson Cheese Factory, I thought I'd go to the shed and do some 'practice' painting.  

You know, the sort of thing you do when you don't have anything in particular in mind, but want to paint something.

Today's practice was some rustic bird painting in the style of Peter Ompir.

I love the simplicity of his style, yet it is very bold.  More bold than I am accustomed to.

I found this photo online of one of his bowls.

I'm not really sure what the bird was suppposed to be, but I thought I would interpret into my own bird.

Painting stylistically is a lot of fun.  

While on the rooster trail, I painted this one up.

It is really unusual for me to paint on a white background - sort of reminded me of french provincial style farmhouse painting.

I'm calling it a day now - off to cook.

What have you been painting/making lately?

cheers

Fi

More Folk Art Practice....

Still continuing with practicing techniques and more on Norwegian folk art styles.

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