I believe that in every artist’s journey, there are moments when you feel you’ve hit the core—or at least, you’re getting very close. For me, many of those moments have been about ornaments. I simply love drawing and painting decorative lines.

This week, I share a recent watercolor painting that is full of ornaments and how I fell in love with ornaments in the first place.

Ornaments in Watercolor

This is how the watercolor painting started.

Ornamental shapes are much easier to draw than paint. In 2020, I made this watercolor painting.

I can now paint much more elegant shapes.

I have been after this skill for so long.

Ornaments – Are They Scary or Harmless?

An ornament is an animal. At first, it’s like a fox that is a bit too tame. You meet it on an evening walk and feel like shouting: “Don’t follow me, I’m not giving you a home!”

Then someone says, “It’s just an ornament, a harmless little decoration. It’s not a fox, it’s a bird.” And that’s when I realize I am dreaming about a magpie, picking only the oldest and most beautiful spoons from the pile.

But when I go to my imaginary pile of spoons, I see snakes. I can only catch the slowest and clumsiest one. My line was quite ugly for a long time, yet it has been my mascot for years. For just as long, I have been searching for the core of my expression.

In 2018 and 2019, my drawing skills took a jump, and I was able to incorporate more and more ornamental expression into my drawings. I participated in Inktober and built two drawing courses: Animal Inkdom and Magical Inkdom.

Looking Through The Lens

Lately, I’ve read many descriptions of artists—both by the artists themselves and by critics. It felt as if I were forcing myself to read tiny text through a small lens, all while swallowing an ornament-shaped lump in my throat.

I believe the most accurate descriptions of how art is born are linked to childhood. My love for ornaments comes from my own.

Our family wasn’t wealthy, but we were dreamers. We followed the lives of European royalty with admiration. The large yard of our old wooden house, with its meadows and little woods, turned into a queen’s castle in my mind. I imagined grand halls, furniture, and a magnificent atmosphere. Nature became my palace once I understood that a plant should be looked at as a structure, not just a decoration.

From a Clumsy Snake to Expression

In the process of making art, however, the ornament is not a child, but an old soul. When a line is still young, it has no idea of the wisdom and beauty it can eventually store within its curves.

I believe that anyone who has the patience to feed their “clumsy snake” will eventually be rewarded. This madness—this love for ornaments—begins to transform from simple decoration into pure expressive power.

Almost all of my drawing courses are about developing a living line that can then transform into an ornamental one. A great courses to start are the colored pencil courses, especially Mystical Minis.

Painting Ornaments

It has taken me a long time to paint more ornamentally. I have had to learn to imagine an ornament as a 3-dimensional structure rather than just a decoration.

Now that I can paint like I used to draw, I can add many things that I have missed from that era, for example, tassels.

I can now also include what I learned from decorative painting when creating the course Decodashery.

There is a sense of the medieval and the Baroque here, blended with the historical fantasy and folklore.

I have also worked in this ornamental style not only in watercolor, but also in oil, but I will share those projects later.

In the world of ornaments, every line has its own age. Is your line still a curious child, or is it beginning to store the wisdom of an ‘old soul’? Tell me about your process in the comments!