When I was painting 7 years ago, I hated watercolour, but when my mom bought me a little travel palette – since my trip to Japan fell right at the start of my return to art – I couldn’t fill it with gouache since it would dry out. So I decided to give watercolour a try.

Because I was on a group tour, I didn’t actually paint at all until the last few days when I started missing it enough (and needed time to recharge alone in my hotel room).

I thought I’d be painting scenes of Japan but I settled on a scene from home. I took some haphazard photos before I left of my grandmas cabin, so I could embellish and edit them how I wanted. This piece is of the kitchen window – the view you get while you wash dishes. It’s full of all typical grandma knickknacks: an assortment of ceramic and wooden fish, a tea set decorated with a family of raccoons, and a random sign of a rooster. Beyond that you can see the trees and lake in the distance.

I never knew I could get this amount of detail from watercolour. And I had lots of fun adding all the little details like the warm red shadows and the shine of the glaze on the blue fish. It felt so easy and natural to me that it was like it painted itself.

Another watercolour I started while I was in Japan, this was a picture I took on my first day there. I struggled with getting all the tiny details of the buildings and figuring out all the proportions, especially on this postcard sized watercolour paper. But this piece has grown on me since.

Home Again | Film Photos as Inspiration

This piece was inspired by a film photo I took on Whidbey Island. After my trip, I went back to Salt Spring Island and brought along my watercolours to keep entertained. I started painting this with it taped to the kitchen counter – unfortunately too close to dinner time. I had to move it and since it was still wet it tore. A little glue fixed it well enough.

My favourite boat in Ganges harbour is this old tug boat, Seahorse, that has been sitting for many years now. I finally managed to capture a decent photo of it since my SLR can zoom in. Up to this point I’ve been painting every single inch of paper, so here I chose to use negative space for the clouds and bright whites on the boat. I bought this long postcard size watercolour paper in Japan which has been fun to work with.

Revisiting the theme of windows, this one above is from a film photo I took on a road trip to Forks Washington. You can see the original for that one and the one below here. I love how this one turned out – I think the yellows in the trees and bushes really bring it to life.

I feel like sunsets can very easily just end up looking like something someone painted at a paint and sip and I think this one really falls into that category. Note to self: don’t use black in sunset photos.

I decided to try a more minimal approach to watercolour, so for this snowy mountain I let the white paper show through instead of painting it. I also chose purples and blues for the shadows and trees and sky. I’m always wanting to fill every inch of paper because I’m trying to control the edges of the watercolour as much as possible so this was a good exercise in letting go.

Trying another sunset and revisiting the windows theme once again. I think I was able to get a lot more dimension out of the darks in this but I still don’t love it that much. I think I’ll put sunsets on the back burner for now.

One last watercolour – this is an honorary ‘out of sketchbook’ painting since it was carefully torn out of my sketchbook because I love it so much. Getting the contrast between the glassy water and weathered wood was so much fun. I finally bought a proper watercolour sketchbook and some larger paper so now I’m working on another building.

One last recent watercolour – creating the glassy see thru water effect again was very fun. I tried out some new techniques with it. I also wanted to focus on using as many different colours as I could while keeping it realistic so I ended up using a lot of purples, blues, and yellow ochre.