Back from a long rest

The reason for the lack of posts here lately is the total absence of computers in my family´s summer house on an island just off the northern coast of Sweden. I´ve spent three weeks there, drawing, trying out my new tube watercolors and just being utterly lazy. I feel totally rested now, and since I´m back in Stockholm I thought I´d start looking after my blog again.

I´ll start with one of the watercolor paintings I did. I usually draw with an ink pen and then use watercolors on top, but during this vacation I´ve been practicing more “classical” watercolor painting, with just a few strokes of a hard pencil as a composition support before laying the colors on the paper. I brought a collection of different watercolor papers with me to the island, and painted mostly on these loose papers instead of in my sketchbooks.

Using tube watercolors – wet, not dried as in my everyday tiny watercolour box – was quite a revelation to me. It was easier than I thought, and funnier. I never really tried it before, thinking it would be too messy bringing the tubes with me. This time I´ve kept them in a tiny plastic box in my bag, together with a generously sized plastic palette, and it actually wasn´t that much trouble carrying them around. Mixing is as easy (or hard) as with dry colors, but the intensity of the colors comes easier with the wet paint. It´s faster too, since you don´t have to spend time solving the colors with a wet brush.

This is a view from the cliffs of a small island southeast of “our” island. It was sunny and windy, so the paint dried really fast on the paper. Good for me, since I tend to be a bit impatient with watercolors…

This was the first painting I did with wet tube paints. Considering that, and the fact that I haven´t been doing watercolor paintings in a very long time, I think it turned out ok. Funny thing, though, that I didn´t notice until I scanned it and saw it in small size on my computer screen: I´ve managed to get a bit of a fisheye view somehow. The horizon is crooked and the clouds look like they spread out from the middle. Don´t know how that happened.

Anyway, I´ll be back with more watercolors as soon as I´ve scanned them all.