Following the Inner Color
Here is my latest completed oil painting “Elixir.” I start my abstract paintings with the idea that I follow an inner color.
Color Chooses Color
The inner color is the color I feel drawn to, so I tend to pick and mix the first colors intuitively. And then, they wish for other colors to accompany them.
Colors also evoke shapes, and the shapes bring in more colors. A raw and bright color selection changes slowly to a more sophisticated one. In this color-driven technique, the inner color changes as the painting matures.
I try to give my painting enough time to find its own soul and paint several sessions, letting the paint dry between them.
First a Child, Then a Teenager
When the painting is only a child, I don’t care about the composition or what it will represent. I don’t want to force a short childhood or early adolescence. When puberty begins, it’s tempting to call the painting finished. But only then does she begin to find her own, unique mission and get prepared for a long life.
Teenagers often tell how they want to be called. When this painting was still unfinished, she was Ophelia because she saw herself as John Everett Millais’s painting from the 19th century.
I usually give the final name only when the painting is almost finished. Then I know what I want to emphasize with the name. Maybe we humans should get our final name a little later too?
Early Goodbye
I take pictures of my canvas paintings outside if possible, because that’s where the light is most natural. My husband often acts as my assistant and holds the painting against the wind. Most of the time, I end the photoshoot by saying to him, “Hey, come take a picture of us together!”
Since I sell all my paintings, this is the moment when I’m saying a mental goodbye to them. I assure them: “You’ll be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.” Even though I often miss my paintings, I don’t tell them. I feel like their mission is bigger than mine, and my job is to deliver all this for others, not for myself.
I have practiced most of my oil painting techniques in a quicker medium, so in watercolor!
Wild Garden – You Can Still Hop in!
In Wild Garden, we will paint freely, intuitively, and expressively in watercolor from Sept 22 to Nov 14. We will begin with floral greeting cards and gradually move forward in expression.
The course has just started but you can still hop in!
>> Sign up now!
What to Create with Colored Pencils? – Watch the Video!
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!
P.S. You can still sign up for Joyful Coloring!
Last Bloom – Watercolor Pencil Inspiration
This week we celebrate watercolor pencils and the lifecycle of flowers. I hope this post fills you with watercolor pencil inspiration!
We in Finland have had a warm fall and many flowers are still blooming, even though it is already September. It inspired me to use yellows and oranges, which I love anyway.
Comforting Watercolor Pencil Inspiration
Lately, I’ve been editing videos for the upcoming course Joyful Coloring, which I recorded for the most part in the summer. I don’t know if the teacher can say it herself, the students decide that, but the videos are so inspiring!
So watercolor pencils are really calling me now. I bought 20 more when I found them quite inexpensively, even though they are a good brand: Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle. And I also bought more paper – Fabriano Accademia Drawing Paper. It is not watercolor paper but works well for colored pencils and is more affordable. When you draw a lot, pencils and paper get used up.
One of the best things about my job is that I can make “comfort drawings” for the blog. So, in the same way that there are comfort books, or comfort food, or comfort music, you can also make comfort drawings.
You can let colored pencils take care of all worries and unnecessary thoughts. Float in the sunshine and focus on everything beautiful!
Filling the Desert
I like to start a drawing with a scenery, which I then fill. This method is also taught in the course Joyful Coloring.
When immersing in the details, you can enjoy the fact that the world shrinks into a tiny area. I think that everything great and wonderful starts small. When thoughts decrease, possibilities expand. Then it is easier to invent and learn new things.
Meadow is a Town
I have looked at the last flowers of summer and admired their details. It’s amazing how much there is in a small meadow flower: stems, seedcases, and flowers and leaves in different stages. And when you multiply those, the group of plants forms a busy town. A meadow is like an upright map of intersections, stations, and roads that guide the bees.
Colors of this kind of world are coming and going. Nothing is permanent and yet everything is so comforting and full of life.
Joyful Coloring – Sign up Now!
The new course Joyful Coloring begins on Sept 16!
Get your watercolor pencils and join me to create freely with joy and sunshine! >> Sign up now!
Joy of Nature in Colored Pencil
This week, we learn from nature and bring its joy to our colored pencil art.
It makes me sad how colored pencils are used only for replicating photos, and how little there is room for free expression. Nature grows freely, so why not give our art the same opportunity? I hope this post inspires you to do more intuitive coloring!
Joy of Nature: Patchwork
Think about nature sceneries as crazy quilts that have fabrics and seams! The fabrics are larger areas and the seams are lines. Patchwork has short seams, so keep your lines quite short too.
When you walk in nature, stop, and see the quilt by searching for the mesh of trees and bushes. Observe how twigs cross over each other and form nature’s patchwork.
Then when you start coloring a blank paper, focus on building the asymmetric and abstract style quilt, rather than thinking about trees and such.
I find this kind of “patchwork coloring” a lot of fun. Many call this mark-making, but I like to think about creating a patchwork instead. Marks are a more abstract term but textiles connect me to the creative world that is full of ideas.
Joy of Nature: Harmony
Despite its patchy structure, nature sceneries have harmony that our art often lacks. When you walk in nature, step back to admire the big picture and point out the areas by their dominating colors. You could think that the sky and earth both have a few quilts: patchwork areas that mostly have similar colors.
So, when your paper has all kinds of patchwork, compose larger areas by coloring over them so that they get a stronger identity in color. For example, you can have a couple of green areas, a dark area, a more neutral brown area, and one with very light colors.
So, first, you start coloring gently with a wider color scheme and then add larger unified layers over the colorful patchwork.
Joy of Nature: Spirit
I like to think that light is nature’s spirit. When you walk in nature, seek for this spirit. You miss the spirit, if you only point out the big concrete things in the scenery like bushes, trees, water, and sky. To see the spirit, you have to step into the abstract world and look for the light: odd shapes on the trunks of the trees, pattern play on the leaves, and in general, all kinds of small reflections.
For me, it’s helpful to think that the spirit has twins. One is the light and the other is the shadow. When you want more light, you will also get stronger shadows.
Light and shadows add contrast and scatter. When you add them to your piece, it becomes less harmonic, but also less boring.
Joy of Coloring Small
Recently, my colored pencil pieces have been quite small, and the paper has been divided into smaller pieces.
Coloring can be a bit like weeding: you can do it little by little.
First, the result is nothing, but it will bloom over time.
Colored pencils beat other supplies when we are creating this kind of small joyful art.
Here one A4-sized paper has two pieces of colored pencil art. So, you can take short walks or long walks to express the joy of nature in colored pencil.
Mother Nature is the best art teacher. That’s why most of my classes are about what I have learned from her.