Find Ideas for Watercolors with Your Phone’s Camera

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Where to Find Ideas for Watercolors

Artists are in a hard crush to render our world in pigments, graphite, charcoal, etc. These days, we’re limited to finding inspiration inside our own homes during this pandemic.

Whether you live in a studio apartment, a three story house, or a garage, there are always beautiful scenes to paint in watercolors. Let’s take a look at ways to find ideas for watercolors with your phone’s camera (or any other camera).

Your Phone is a Painting Finder

We artists enjoy swinging a water and pigment spotlight on overlooked beauty. We use art supplies to shine a beam of Noticing on something simple-but-lovely.

Try walking through your home with the viewfinder on your phone’s camera – or a traditional camera – open. Go treasure hunting near the windows, looking for cast shadows and interesting shapes. (Read this post about how I found twenty years of watercolor painting ideas in an unremarkable kitchen window.)

Tune Up Your Noticing Muscle

You might trot past a beam of sunlight spilling into your own rooms every day. The afternoon sun is earnestly projecting the leafy silhouette of your plant in a clay pot across the floor. Will you try to notice it?

If your favorite watercolor artist painted that same scene in your house – would you halt in front of the watercolor version of your own surroundings? Would the painting subject – your own window light, a glint of sun on a glazed pot, and the puppet-leaf shadow, cast across the floor – make you see your own space in a new way?

Take 30 Minutes to Notice

Your household vignettes only become art if you slow down enough to notice them, and paint. There are a thousand paintings waiting to be found within 50 yards of where you sit. Brew a cup of tea during the sunniest part of the day, open the camera on your phone, and let’s take a look around.

When the world feels a little crazy, art can slow your roll. When something catches your eye, it can pause your thoughts, interrupt a conversation, and chill the pace of your walk. Noticing beauty is a salve of comfort we consume with our eyes.

Painting Idea Tips

• Do your windows face East? Take photos in the morning, to capture squinty-bright light, and long shadows.
• When your windows face West, be ready with your camera in the late afternoon, with curtains open, and a hunt for the ‘golden hour’ light illuminating every day objects.
• If your windows face North or South, you have the benefit of soft, diffuse light that artist’s treasure in their studios. Open the curtains, and if possible, even the doors, and walk around your things to look for little still life ideas, and broader, interior scene painting compositions.
• If you have no windows, take a walk outside in the hours before sunset, and look for long shadows across flat spaces. A flower casting a shadow across a sidewalk, or a parked car, a house, a street sign or a mailbox. Take lots of photos after viewing the scene from different angles in your camera’s viewfinder.

Your Camera Makes You The Boss

About a third of the way through painting this watercolor still life, I felt like it needed one additional character.

The cutting board was a stage, and the space between the edge of the apple shadows and the mug was too empty.

I went foraging in the kitchen for something not round. With spherical shapes in the mug and the apples, and rounded corners on the cutting board, the pointed knife needed some edgy company. Enter the Laughing Cow wedge!

Painting and Printmaking Ideas

• This post is about painting all sorts of subjects from your very own kitchen, and features examples of other artists doing the same thing.
• With a handful of vintage family photos scanned and printed on a home printer, you can make wonderful collage art of friends and family in make believe scenarios. All you need is a little glue, some paint and your imagination.
• If you’re a beginner at art, you’ll get some good ideas from this post about eleven reasons you should consider making small paintings.
• Folks that want to try printmaking are often searching for subjects to make into a linocut or woodcut, so here are some linocut ideas to get you started.

How Are You Doing?

Thanks for stopping by today. I always appreciate your visits. These stay at home directives are okay for us artist types, but even we need a little chatter and art supply talk with our friends to break up the solo creating time. Don’t you think?

Tell me how you’re doing in the comments. Where will you take your camera to collect some painting ideas? Are you making art? Playing Music? Puttering in the garden? Reading a wonderful book? (I’m almost finished listening to this one.)

I hope you make something soon. See you in the next post –

Belinda

Art Quote

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

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