Wanderlust: watercolour rose

Series: Wanderlust 2021 #28

I am really bad at practising things, or, more specifically, I really hate doing the same thing over and again. If something goes wrong with a project, I will have to do it differently the next time. I have coloured the same stamps more than once on occasion, but I will always use a different colour palette. I admire people who create comics and graphic novels, but I have no idea how they can bear to draw the exact same characters over and over.

So when the starting point for this class was to paint several copies of the same flower… let’s just say I wasn’t exactly rushing to do it. Lynne’s version was a double page spread with a loosely painted watercolour iris on one side and a grid made from cutting up the other paintings on the other. I’m sticking to single pages this time around so I got away with only painting three roses and I only cut up one of those.

I used my own reference photo because I like to adapt the lessons and personalise them a bit rather than just recreating the teacher’s piece. And I’m not a huge fan of irises. Though I will admit it would have been easier to paint an iris in a loose watercolour style. I don’t use watercolour a lot and I did end up being rather more precise than the lesson called for.

It took a while to decide which rose to put on the art journal page — choosing the one to cut up was easier — and I ended up going for the larger of the two, though I’m still not sure whether that one is actually my favourite.

Of course, my favourite drawing of the rose is the one I scribbled for practise with a pen in the nearest notebook to hand (hence the dots).

Class:

• Wanderlust 2021
• Theme: boundaries
• Teacher: Lynne Furrer (website, Instagram)