A Creative Retreat – Time Alone with Creativity
June 4th, 2024
No Distractions
A gift of time to be immersed in creativity came my way a week or so ago. A forced stay at home for almost 2 weeks with a no driving mandate, became a time of playing with colors, shapes, paints, paper and more. Minor surgery on one of my toes was how this all came about. Fortunately, all necessary garden work and other work was done. I had almost no distractions.
I set up my table and art supplies. These are some of the paints I used. I didn’t use all of them, but I love having them right beside me.
Inspirations – Flowers always flowers.
I could walk around in my house and gather art materials while I healed. The day before surgery, I picked lots of flowers to put into vases. These served as part of my inspiration. This room fills with rainbows in the morning with the crystals I put in the window. A white flower from my Peace Lily has a rainbow shining on it.
I chose the little purple vase with nasturtiums I planted from seed for my first art project. The vase has a purple glaze on the outside and turquoise inside.
Flowers have so much beauty and mystery that I would like to climb into each one like a bee and stay for hours. How to capture the essence of flowers and express the feelings they evoke is always the challenge.
Letting the Eye Dance Along
I started drawing the nasturtiums with contour drawings. These drawings are made with a pencil and one continuous line. Blind contour is done by only looking at the object and not the paper. These drawings were done by sometimes looking at the paper to see what marks were there. The best way to describe this way of drawing, is to let your eyes dance along the edges. Simplifying what is there while making marks of what is important is what contour drawing is about.
I made several contour drawings, coloring the last one.
Loose Watercolors
I made two watercolors again trying to simplify in a loose way. Creating expressive loose flower paintings is a never-ending journey.
Mandala Flower
My last painting was to look at the nasturtium flower straight on, as if I were a bee ready to fly inside. Getting lost in its mandala shape is easy.
Gold watercolor surrounds the flower in the painting below. I want to make more paintings looking straight at the flower that are looser, but with more details. Not an easy task.
New Ways of Playing
I collect hundreds of ideas for ways to work with watercolors from online artists. I seldom have time to try out what I see. During this creativity retreat I did have time to play around with some of these ideas: liquid watercolor paints, thin paper, granulating watercolors, salt water and more.
Granulation
A popular type of watercolor paint that I love has the quality of granulation where the color’s pigments form into little pools of more concentrated color. Some granulating watercolors are also made up of several colors to form one color. When enough water and the right paper are used, the colors separate. It’s fun to watch as multiple colors appear. The spiral mandala above has a purple granulating ink that contains turquoise blue. The darker pooled areas are from thin paper that wrinkled when wet. The darker areas in the oval mandala’s purple/blue and red areas below are due to the wet paper’s wrinkles. The purple/blue areas show hints of red. That paint is one color that separates into two. For some of these paintings I used salt water with the same ratio of water to salt as ocean water. I’m not sure what effect that had. An artist online who uses sea water thought it enhances flow and granulation.
Watercolor paper is thick to stop the paper from wrinkling when it is wet. But thin paper that wrinkles, lets granulation be shown more because the paint pools in the wrinkles creating darker and lighter areas. It’s a fun effect I saw online and tried. I’ll be exploring this more.
Paint in a Bottle
Some watercolor paints are thinned to water consistency. They come is a bottle with a dropper and have intense pigments. Wetting an area of the paper first with a brush and clear water and then putting a drop of liquid watercolor paint onto the already wet area, lets the colors flow dramatically. Watching the movement of colors is a treat. Again something I had not really played with before and will do more. The paintings below were both made by wetting areas and then dropping one or several drops of paint into that area. The pink and green were painted first and let dry. Water was then put outside the circle centers. Drops of blue and purple were added around the edge of the circles flowing into most of the clear water areas.
More Play
As I write this blog, I have a few more days left in my retreat time. I can’t wait to be inspired and step into more creative play.
Next Blog in August
I am taking time to visit family and travel in June and July. The next blog will be in August.
I hope to share creativity from the next Mandala & Creativity Circle in July. Unfortunately, the May Creativity Circle was cancelled due to Tornado warnings and a big storm.
