secret no 4, new technique & watermarks

i am participating in the next chapter, reading 12 secrets of highly creative women by gail mcmeekin.

i'm a little late with secret No. 4 - surrendering to creative cycles, but here are my thoughts anyway. in this chapter gail mcmeekin talks about times when we may be creatively 'fallow'. this is a time when we need to trust that creativity will return as part of a natural cycle. ebb and flow.

i can't remember ever being creatively fallow exactly, but there have certainly been times when all my attention has had to be directed to other things, such as children, jobs, caring for an elderly parent & achieving better health. throughout all of these times there have always been opportunities to be creative in different ways. in fact caring for children is a highly creative endeavor and illness gave me the gift of time at home to concentrate on making art.

so i think it's more a case of sometimes being in creative neutral rather than being at a total standstill. for me it seems that my creativity is always looking for a way of being expressed, even if it's only putting on some eye-liner and mascara in the morning or making a pizza!

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this fish (which hopefully you can see through the watermarks) has been a lovely experiment in watercolour technique that is new to me. i have always used watercolour pencils, but for a while now i have found that these were not allowing me to paint the way i needed to. i was lucky enough to find a demonstration by artist lori rase-hall who uses watercolour in tubes and cakes. lucky me! new paints & new brushes - and the 'know how'!

i thoroughly enjoyed making this and played around with a text watermark demo that i found. i'm not saying it's the best site, i haven't really shopped around, but it was good to see what is possible, if you want to protect your artwork on the internet.