What have in common watercolours, bleach and poppies ?

The answer is simple: me!

I wanted to experiment wet on wet (adding bleach into a watercolour wash) and brushing first bleach and adding the watercolour wash after. This is what I did and here is the result:​

Somehow, I thought I was going to get a bigger difference between the areas touched with bleach and the rest of the page. Note to self: ventilate the area and preferably work outside (not possible right now, we are still getting negative Celsius around here). This stuff stinks ...

After looking at the results for a while pondering what to do next, I saw something that reminded me of poppies at the bottom of the page. When I turned the page 180 degrees, I saw the head of a cute puppy. Now, that was an interesting conundrum - what to do?! 

In the end, I voted for the poppies since they were the first ones I saw. Also, I thought this is a good opportunity to then cut the flowers digitally and use them to learn how to make designs in gimp.

Here are the poppies:

I enhanced the colours a bit and and then extracted few flowers and leaves to bring over in GIMP. 
This part turned out to be longer and harder than I thought - because I never used GIMP or anything similar. 

Removing the background turned out to be a long process, much longer than anticipated. As a result, I have less flowers and leaves than I originally thought. I used what I had to create a small flower arrangement and I played with different colour backgrounds. I also created a few repeating patterns - for the sake of the exercise.

I also extracted an abstract pattern from another sketch, but that one turned out impossible to convert - at least for me. The nature of the lines and pattern was such that it made removing the white a task that I was not going to undertake any time soon. 

I did however convert another sketch of a peony done with a Chinese brush. This type of brush work is not great for converting in digital format. My opinion only, of course.

Lessons learned:

• allow a significant amount of time for the work, at least for a while as I am learning the program. I hope the process will get faster as I practice.
• working digitally is different. Must consider this ahead of time, as it will influence how I approach the sketching or painting process.
• the process depends also on what I want to do with the piece digitally. Will I need a transparent background or not? At the moment, I am tempted to say I will only use white backgrounds. Or most of the time ...
• having different colours for the background is fun!
• patterns are fun too, but I have to figure out what makes a good pattern
• having a good system for storing digital files becomes super important
• ditto for tags - I don't use them but I will have to otherwise I will never find anything
• even with the few elements I have, the possibilities of combining them are quite impressive
• cleaning up the background is easier with a higher zoom and a clean line to begin with. The more irregular the original, the harder it is to clean (the peony).

This is it for now. See  you soon!