Love Lost and Found
- Kaaren Poole
- 25 minutes ago
- 3 min read
A few days ago I finished the watercolor painting I’d been working on. Watercolor is not a comfortable medium for me, so it was quite a challenge. Nevertheless, I did finish.
My last step was to add the mice, and once they entered the scene, I was reasonably happy with the results. But I wasn’t sure what to do with the painting.
Just for the fun of it, I uploaded it to Redbubble to see what a few of their products would look like with this art work. I particularly like the way the mug looks. (Click the image to go to this collection in my Redbubble shop.)
But still, what to do with the painting? I liked it too much to stuff it away in a drawer, but not enough to hang it on the wall. So, as a compromise, I decided to turn it into an art journal spread. The painting would no longer live as a painting, but would live on in another form and continue to remind me of my progress on my watercolor journey—if there turns out to be such a thing!
I needed some think time before I actually started on the spread. How, exactly, would I use the painting? It seemed fairly clear that I’d end up using pieces of it rather than the whole thing. Then it occurred to me that the painting tells, or at least suggests, a story. So, I decided to write the story then create small illustrations for various parts of it. They could join parts of the painting to tell the story which the painting suggested to me.
Here’s where I am now. The spread is begun, and it has a name - love Lost and Found.
The mouse looking into the burrow, the little stand of meadow flowers, the berry branches, and the bird are the new bits I created for the story. I drew them with pencil, then inked the lines, then painted them with watercolor. I sprayed them with fixative so I could glue them on the spread. The little bees are from seed packets. The band of dahlias along the right side are from an advertisement I got in the mail for an online plant nursery. I just couldn’t throw it away, and now it and the bees have found a home.
The watercolor on the new bits isn’t as strong as the watercolor on the parts of the painting, and that’s one of the reasons I used ink on those pieces.
It will be interesting to see where the piece takes me from here.
I have a YouTube channel and there are several videos there about art journaling, as well as art project videos. In fact, I just added another art journal flip through video. You can access my channel by clicking the button below. Why not check it out? And if you like what you see, please subscribe. Subscribing is free and helps my videos get found.
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