Splashing Through Life - Art by Patricia Henderson

I was excited a few weeks ago to receive an email from a lady who had found my art on Fine Art America . She was interested in having me paint a full sheet (22" X 30") watercolour similar to my painting "Fiesta!" Well, it has been a while since I did that painting, so I got to work composing and practising. After two failed paintings, (lets call them practice pieces!) I finally got to one I liked. The client likes it too, so it will soon be heading off to Pickering! Here it is, Fiesta 3:

In my last post I mentioned how you can use things around the house or purchased at the dollar store to create texture in watercolour or acrylics. Here are a few examples of some of the "tools" I use to create texture for my collage papers and for interesting backgrounds. Here I have some cheesecloth, Halloween spider webbing, and a styrofoam tray that holds test tubes. (I get these from work, we throw them out everyday so if you want some let me know. You'd just have to pay for the shipping!) The ever popular bubble wrap (also fun to pop while waiting for paint to dry!), the one with the squares is a mat for the sink, and I can't remember what the other thing is! The white one is for under rugs to keep them from slipping and the green one was for under placemats. The yellow stuff was in the craft section. Not sure what it's called. This texture was created by first underpainting in fluid acrylic, then applying another wash and placing the green mat ...

You've heard the expression, "She's no spring chicken!" Well this girl is! Okay, so maybe her comb isn't as grand as the Rooster next door, but she's got attitude and can tiptoe through the tulips with the best of them! This painting is 14" X 10" and consists of handpainted and found papers applied to gallery wrapped canvas. I discovered that I had almost no rusty brown or gold papers, so had fun making some with various textures. My friend Sue Galos and I spent a fun blizzardy afternoon a couple of years ago in the dollar store picking up things that we thought would make a good texture when pressed on wet painted paper. I made use of a lot of them! Maybe on another post I'll show you some if you'd like.

Okay, I've become obsessed with this technique already! A couple of days ago, I reorganized my studio and obtained a few more storage containers which act almost like a very large pallette. Now I have 3 large containers for the primary colours, red, yellow and blue and 3 for my secondary colour, orange, green and purple. I would really like more, for my warm and cool blues for example, but I'm afraid my room will be taken over by containers! I've started thinking ahead, and since I always enter the Desmond Juried art show at the Ridgetown Agricultural Collage each summer, I have already finished a piece that I might enter. The theme is always farm and rural living so I think this piece will fit in nicely! "Time to Wake Up!" 14 X 11" on gallery wrapped canvas I want to make a companion for this piece but I'm waiting for my canvas order to arrive. In the meantime I thought I'd do one on kind of a similar theme on a tiny 6 X 6" canvas. "Su...

Well, this is one of the most "girlie" paintings I have ever done, but I really like how this one turned out. Again, I used scraps of old watercolour paintings and bits of magazines and some hand painted papers. This time I also collaged over a failed acrylic abstract on a small 8" X 10" canvas. I've been writing down ideas for more of these collage paintings, and I'm quite excited about them! I haven't been this excited about painting since I first started, so I think I may be on to something. I'm sure I'll go back and forth between my first love of watercolours and collage, but right now I'm so glad to have gotten that spark back! I'm also tempted to do some really bad watercolours just to have them to rip up! LOL After the holidays I'll be doing more and also hand painting some papers in some of the colours that I need. I will be looking for magazines, calendars, old maps, sheet music, crossword puzzles, almost any kind of pape...

Lately I've been captivated by some wonderful collage paintings by Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson and my buddy Lauren Everett Finn . It got me to thinking about all of the, shall we say, "less than successful" paintings I had taking up space in my studio. If you look closely at the painting you'll see that some small scraps from old magazines have found their way in there too! Last weekend I sat on the floor and had a great time ripping them up and pasting! It was quite therapeutic. This is the outcome: Here Comes the Sun! I know I'll be doing more of these! Yesterday I kind of organized my scraps into different colour categories. I've got a drawer for yellows and oranges, one for greens and blues and one for red and purples. I also have some earth tones and whites segregated. I need more drawers! I've also decided that I haven't got a lot of red scraps so I've started creating some new hand painted paper, which is great fun in itself, allowing m...

"Uncle Homer" After commenting on a blog post by Frederick Winston on his great art blog about Homer Watson the other day, Frederick contacted me to ask if he could write a post about me! Wow, what an honour! He was interested in the fact that Homer Watson, Canadian landscape artist was my great, great uncle. You can see the post HERE .