Messy Backgrounds

Hello!

Last night instead of sewing I decided to watch a couple videos on YouTube. I’m inspired by the artist, Alisa Burke, who uses a variety of supplies to make her illustrative paintings and drawings. She works on paper and unstretched canvas. I love her canvas pieces because they get sewn into bags after she paints and draws on the canvas. I, of course, want to make some of my own mixed media bags.

One of the YouTube videos I watched of Alisa creating art was called Watercolor Flowers – Start with Color. As the title suggests she started with loose watercolor circles and what I like to call blobs. After the circles and blobs are painted on the page, she lets it dry, and then uses permanent pens to draw in her flowers over the blobs of color. As soon as I watched the video, I knew I had to try it. I grabbed the small set of watercolors I had, some brushes, and I found a pad of watercolor paper. I followed Alisa’s instructions and created my masterpiece. The one thing I learned was not to color in the white spaces in the background until the end. I did it as I went and ended up with some funky shaped flowers. I had too much black background space so I took a white gel pen and drew little squares and rectangles all over the page.