Playing About...

...with the watercolour crayons again.  For quite a while, I've been wondering why my paintings are so unlike my textiles, notably, these garden paintings such as 'Summer Garden', which hangs in my living room.  I have made several garden quilts; a series called 'Dawn In The Healer's Garden', which, astonishingly to me, don't appear on this blog, except in this little glimpse... from which you can see that the quilts appear to be significantly more structured than this painting, although, interestingly, the intention behind both approaches was the same.  I wanted to suggest a series of random glimpses of colour and movement that is possible in a garden, particularly a cottage garden, where flowers are grown en masse, and wave in the wind. 

I went out for half an hour yesterday, which has left me too damn tired to do anything with textiles, but the crayons and a sketchbook were to hand, so I thought I'd play with them, to replicate this sort of look.  Only to discover that it wasn't really possible...or not in the way I was working...

I think the problem is the type of mark it's possible to make with crayons.  They're not as easy to manipulate as paint, or maybe I'm just too lazy, or too tired, to make the kind of small mark that I was aiming for.  This drawing makes me think, not of a garden, but of a distant forest in autumn... or it did, until I applied water, and then it all went to hell in a handcart.  I had expected a bit of muddying of the clear colours that the crayons give, but what I wasn't expecting was the brush to moult.  Substantially. Which you can't see in the image below, but trust me, there's lots of the little blighters.  Growl.  I suspect I would have got the result I wanted, had I been able to spray the paint with water, rather than using a brush....but we'll never know.

You've heard me say that 'nothings succeeds as planned' frequently throughout the life of this blog.  I can actually see some potential for further work, though... not done in this way, though.  It's possible to make monoprints using watercolour crayons; in truth, that's why I bought them in the first place, it's just that I never actually tried it.  I can see that blocks of colour would be really interesting... possibly combined with a bit of collage.  So it's not all lost.  Play is never a waste of time; there's always something to learn.  Hurrah.