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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Fifty Itty Bitty Paintings, Part One

On Christmas weekend I watched a wonderful video on the Artist's Network TV website (subscription only) called "A Little Watercolor" with Karin Huehold (you can check out a preview here).   The idea is to buy one sheet of watercolor paper, tear it up into 72 ATC (artist trading card) size pieces (2.5 x 3.5 inches), and then paint a bunch of quick, tiny watercolors.

The purpose is to have fun and learn more about how your brushes work and how your colors interact.

I thought this sounded like a good project for my vacation during the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve.   So I decided to try to create Fifty Itty Bitty Paintings before 2016.  That gave me an extra twenty-six cards to share with my family members or use later.

I bought a nice, thick piece of paper, 22 x 33 inches.  I didn't know what I was buying, but later I figured out it was Strathmore Gemini mould-made paper.  Very stiff, and rough.  It held up beautifully when ripping into the small pieces.

Then I bought painter's masking tape in 1/2 inch and 1/4 inch widths.  I wanted to have the nice clean edges that Huehold had in her pictures in the video.  This tape was pretty hard to find--I wound up ordering it from amazon here and here.   I taped the fifty pieces while I hung out with the family, so I was all ready to go!

Since part of the point for me was learning what colors did together on the paper, I wrote on the back of each painting which colors I used.

Here are numbers 1-10.




















All of these are from my imagination, but inspired by memories of things I've seen walking in the woods especially in western and northern Michigan.

I'll share the rest of the series in the next few posts!

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

I had so much fun looking through your pics in this series! I joined World Watercolor Month and decided to go through Karin's course during July--it's nice to see what someone else has done with it.

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