Water water everywhere, and n'er a drop to drink!

Have I mentioned, I love Linda Knight??  Her workshops are just so relaxed.  It's not about replicating something of hers (as if!), it's all about the techniques.  This session was about water colouring - not the old master style, but how to use wet pigments to create amazing backgrounds.  There was a lot of water used for these.

I took along my brusho pigments, which I bought last year sometime.  I got a bit scared about using them....but not any more!!    Brushos are pure pigment in granular form, they come in little plastic pots, and you add water. I'm now thinking about adding them to white acrylic...hmm...

Our substrate was an A1 sheet of watercolour paper, ripped into three.  Most of the group bound them into books, but I haven't done this yet.  I worked on each of them as a land(or water)scape, so when I tried to fold them into the chapter for my book, the landscape got lost.  I want to create a few more pages, and perhaps bind it differently, so these pages will sit on the side for a while, while I cogitate on this further!

While I was working, one of the lovely ladies on the session suggested that I drop a tiny pinch of the granulated pigment into the wet background.  OMG!  As you can tell, I LOVED the effect this gave.

Then Linda showed us how to stamp with bleach (another one of those things I was scared to do - why???  Easy, and what great effects.  So, here are the outputs!

The first photos are of the sea page.  The wavy lines are a stamp - in bleach.  the speckles are the dry brusho sprinkled on the west background.


Now, this one...

It looked like a really stormy sky...so I dripped bleach through a pipette down the page, to get lightening!  It needs a tree at the bottom I think.

























I knew as soon as I stamped the flower border at the bottom of this page, that it was going to be butterflies!


























 Dragonflies, oh yes!  Several stamped in bleach, and a couple them over-stamped with pigments - I think this was inktense.

I put a dollop of mica powder into bubblegum dylusions, and painted it on for some dimension... you can just make it out, shimmering!





In real life, this one is lovely...but I'm not quite sure what it is yet!!


















 This one is going to be dandelion heads I think.  You can see where I stamped a flower in bleach and in ink top left, if you squint a bit!!!













 This is all the leftovers from my palette!  with a couple of drops of drawing ink.  This is rigid with mica, and where I stamped my Dragonfly for the Craftbarn challenge  (different dragon fly - I need to get that big one from Linda!!  It is gorgeous and HUGE!!)

Hope you like!