Splashes of Water and Touches of Paint

Sharing art is something I love to do. So when a friend of mine suggested that we should paint together, I was excited. Our session was quite brief, though; we painted in the forty minutes that we had before she had to leave to catch the train back to Chennai.

This is what we did: my friend, who's new to watercolours, doodled and splashed colours randomly on ATCs and one A4-sized sheet of watercolour paper. Then the two of us searched the mess for anything we could recognise. We teased out the shape from the splotches, and suddenly we had six paintings, and just forty minutes left to catch the train, forget about going to a bookshop first, and then buying kababs to eat for dinner, and taking photos at the station...



Some reds and yellows and reserved white space turned into this flower.


This ATC also started out as a red and yellow experiment. Not sure whether it suggests wild flowers growing upon an embankment...



This one was the last we did. Patches of yellow and blue with a lot of white space to the right led to some bushes, and then some water, and then a tree leaning over the pool, and then us running out of time. We were thinking of some blue waterlilies, perhaps... or lifting out a white heron...



This little bird we consider to be a poor, ruined thing. Ah, you should have seen this ATC when it was mere splotches of burnt umber and indigo lines. We darkened the indigo lines to bring the bird to life. At that point the painting looked beautiful... very Oriental... even minimalist. And then things got out of control, with a dash of quinacridone here, and a touch of terre verte there. If only this had been our last painting, we wouldn't have had the time to fuss over it.




This painting is slightly more than A4 size. A jellyfish created out of the colours on my friend's t-shirt. My friend now claims to have fallen for watercolours hook, line and sinker.


There was one more ATC, but I've decided against loading that here... it showed a couple making love in the sky, and I might have had to change the settings to warn the innocent or something.