This week I have a short inspirational video for you. I wanted to make a video that I can share on Instagram, so this has different portions than my videos usually are. You can watch it bigger by pressing the last icon on the menubar below the video.
Most of these drawings are made with regular colored pencils (or crayons as some call them) and some with watercolor pencils. I love both.
Coloring Freely on Blank Paper – Simple Start!
I am an advocate for coloring freely – starting with blank paper, adding colors on top of each other, and getting excited about what comes up. This doesn’t have to be anything difficult. Here’s an old picture from 2015 that I still find inspiring. You can illustrate your journaling with freely colored boxes.
Children draw freely with colored pencils, but when they grow up and become “colored pencil artists” they need all kinds of references to get started. References are great for learning some techniques, but they don’t make anyone an artist. A big part of art is in our mind – how we open up and how we allow ourselves to break boundaries.
Growing Your Skills
My love for colored pencils is based on a promise that I have made for my inner child: I will color for you and help others to color for theirs. So even if I make oil paintings and media art too, colored pencils always have a special place in my heart.
So, welcome to my courses to improve your skills and expand your artistic thinking!
It’s exciting to announce that a new online art course is coming up! Joyful Coloring will begin on Sept 16, 2024. This course is for watercolor pencils. It has many fun projects – I hope you will love it! >> See more!
The early-bird registration has opened. >> Sign up here!
The early-bird sale will end on August 18th, 2024, at midnight PDT.
I paint watercolors freely without models or reference photos. It’s exciting to see what appears on the paper and to examine random spots trying to find flowers and plants, which are my favorite subjects. I believe that if I manage to create favorable conditions, the plants will start to grow naturally on paper.
When painting flowers freely without references, it’s easy to omit the details. But I think that the details make the finished look. Everything doesn’t have to be sharp and intricate but focus on those parts that you want to catch the viewer’s eye.
Making a Color Chart
My watercolor set has colors from many different manufacturers. I use artist-quality colors and always as pans. If I buy a tube, I’ll squeeze the paint into the pan. I like to use a color chart. The colors look darker when wet and on the pans as well. And there are differences in how pigments behave.
My grid follows the order of the pans and I add the names of the pigments below the color samples. A part of the colors are in a separate box waiting for their turn to get to the 36-pan set. I make notes on them at the end of the chart. The color chart prevents me from buying several similar pans (that happened too many times before I made one!) and helps with memorizing which colors are my favorites.
Start Freely – Finish Slowly!
There are watercolor painters who wet the paper, draw a few brushstrokes on it and the painting is finished. I work on the same painting for several hours and slowly approach the result layer by layer. It requires patience, but on the other hand, I can always paint on fine-quality cotton paper because my approach is less experimental.
I love that the painting doesn’t immediately shout but first whispers timidly. Each painting is unique and I like to spend time getting to know it. In doing so, I will not only learn something about the painting or myself but about humanity and nature in general.
I want the result to look natural, although there is also a lot of decoration in my paintings. I love ornaments – swirls, decorative lines, and shapes, and my favorite historical style is Baroque. It is easy for me to see the luxury of baroque in plants. As a child, I imagined palaces and halls around me when walking in nature. Life in a remote small town in the 1970s was modest, but I got by with imagination.
Finishing a Watercolor Painting – Watch the Video!
In the video, I have footage from the finishing phase. There you can see that when proceeding little by little, you can add all kinds of things even in the final stages. It’s common for me that a shape is just a circle at first, but then I add notches to it and make it a leaf or a flower. Watch the video!
Freely Grown – Using Colored Pencils for Finishing
If you are new to watercolor painting, working with thin brushes can feel challenging. It’s then easier to use colored pencils for finishing a watercolor painting. I have a course called Freely Grown where you learn step-by-step how to make a layered watercolor painting and finish it with colored pencils. All this is done freely without models and by focusing on techniques, so your work has the same steps, but the result will be completely unique.
Freely Grown is now 15% OFF! >>Buy Now! The sale ends on July 31st, 2024, at midnight PDT.
This week, I have a short video artwork that has motion and sound. It’s been made as a part of the big project that I am working on. I have received a grant for it from The Finnish Cultural Foundation.
This is my first video artwork that also has audio. I recorded bird sounds and other natural sounds earlier in the spring and composed the soundscape from those recordings.
The 3D shapes are modeled in the 3D modeling program called Blender, and I have programmed the movement in C# programming language. Everything except the audio was put together in the Unity game engine. I added the soundscape in the video editing program called DaVinci Resolve. These are all pretty complicated tools, and it has taken time to learn them. If you are interested in the process, watch my video: “From Painting to Digital 3D Art” where I tell about the first half of the grant project.
Motion Art – Working with New Media
The big project is called “Unknown Land,” and I call this video artwork “Ornamenttien maa” which is “Land of Ornaments” or “Ornamental Land” in English. It has been a challenge to transfer my drawing and painting style to a new media, but I think I am getting closer and closer. What do you think? Does it look like my work?
Creating movement and sound has been new to me, and I will also add interaction to the final piece.
Even if I have spent a lot of time on my computer called Turandot (named after my favorite composer Giancomo Puccini‘s opera), I am not leaving painting and drawing. You will see my digital artworks from time to time, but there will be a lot of other content too. For an artist, working with one medium can help with other. My main inspiration always starts from drawing what ever I create.
