My love for watercolour started early on in my life from painting very simple, layered mountain-scapes. This was my opportunity to really study colour, light and distance. Growing up both in New Zealand and in US, for the most part very close to the Appalachian range, I have never been short of inspiration. These grand landscapes have had an enormous influence on my desire to depict the mystery, magnificence and ultimately the narrative of nature. For me, art began here.
Painted around 2008, this is part of my personal collection, working with the changing light from morning to evening
This is another landscape piece from my earlier work, also around 2007 or 2008.
Painted again in 2008 when I was living at the base of Tinakori Hill in Wellington, NZ. This was during a time when I was still obsessed with depth and layering from light to dark. This was inspired by a very misty day look up and over a stand of macrocarpa trees.
This is more recent work from 2016. These particular paintings are really a chance for me to play with the quality of colour to create a certain mood.
These types of works are my chance to move away from reality and adapt and more illustrative style. Most often these will be watercolour, without a doubt my favourite medium, with other mediums used to finish the work in (i. e. coloured pencil, gouache, pastel). The paintings here are more recent and incorporate products or techniques that I am totally obsessed with. To name just a few: Daniel Smith Primatek watercolours, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, granulation and texture.
I really love blue and indigo. This piece is a mixture of calm sky in the distance with a moody, dark foreground. The storm cloud and tree detail are a mixture of white gouache and coloured pencil. I was aiming for a children's illustration look with this one.
This is another watercolour experimenting with the quality of light and mood. The question is my mind with this piece is 'what is through the trees'... or do we want to know!
This is a small painting of mine from. Just after Daniel Smith watercolours finally arrived in New Zealand. This was done as a quick illustration to play around with the primatek jadeite genuine pigment. I was working from foreground to background and used Polychromos pencils for some detail over top. This paint granulates beautifully and creates real texture.
The background of this piece is piemontite genuine and bronzite genuine watercolour pigment. I finished this with the tree and some additional texture done in Polychromos pencil.
This kind of work brings me real joy and usually reflects my love of children's illustration and storytelling. These pieces are sometimes done for a story and sometime are the story themselves. Some of these works I have created for a local zine published by a lovely group of friends here in Wellington, NZ
This was the second painting done for the 'Collect' zine. It is a watercolour using a mostly the beautiful iridescent and pearlescent paints from Daniel Smith.
This is my first zine contribution! Windsor Newton artist watercolour finished with silver Gansai Tambi watercolour detail.
This is a gouache piece inspired by Wellington's CubaDupa festival, and, at the time, was a way for me to illustrate the costumes I had in mind Wellington Batucada's big stage performance.
This is painting done in gouache for a 52 week illustration challenge. I think the theme was 'animal'!
The background of this piece was done in beautiful Sennelier shellac based inks. The little fish in the foreground is done using gouache.
watercolour... this is part of a series of female portraits I have slowly been working on.
Odds and ends from ink and graphite sketches to pages from my watercolour sketchbooks.
my sketchbooks are often full of funny characters. I love playing around with expressions and texture.
One of my inktober sketches using India ink and Gansai Tambi watercolours.
