Shirley Trevena

Having mentioned Shirley Trevena previously and not having done any work at all for a couple of days, I thought I'd talk a bit more about her and show you some of her work.

She uses watercolours in a very contemporary and innovative way. Her work is vibrant and colourful, it glows. She isn't interested in a botanical illustration of her subjects but in catching the spirit of them, the drama and the colour. Her compositions are offbeat with a geometric element superimposed on loose flowing subjects and the results are distinctively her own.

I love the way that, like me, she uses sticks and unconventional mark making tools to achieve the results she wants. One thing I learnt, reading her books was the technique of sandpapering watercolour pencils into a wet wash to make beautiful speckled marks - that's something I'll definitely find useful.

She's written 2 books on watercolours, illustrated with lots of her work, she takes you through a painting stage by stage - and it isn't the formulaic nothingness of so many 'how to' books - these are zinging exciting, want-to-live-with-it paintings :)

For all they are so free, they actually take her a long time to produce, days or even weeks and are thought out carefully stage by stage.

She's very generous with information on exactly how she achieves the various areas of her work, the speckling, the washing out, the flooding wet in wet, using watercolour pencils, masking tape, masking fluid, wax candles, oil pastels, collage and a lot more. Anyone wanting to improve their watercolours couldn't do better than buy both books.

books: Vibrant Watercolours and Taking Risks with Watercolour - both available from Amazon.

You can see her work on her website www.shirleytrevena.com


let me know what you think of her work?