30×30 Guest Artist : Anne-Laure Jacquart

30×30 with Anne-Laure Jacquart

I first painted with Anne-Laure in at a 14-day workshop in Portugal, and immediately felt she was onto something with her calligraphic brush-work.

At the time, I was not 100% ready to be doing direct watercolor. I was gradually moving towards these new goals – but she pushed me to do it right now! Just make the change! She proved to me, once and for all, that anything that could be pencil-drawn and tinted, could be drawn directly with the brush using positive and negative shapes – and be stronger for it.

Anne-Laure is a vlogger on youtube at Following the White Rabbit, where she’ll be posting video-journals and possibly painting-demos during #30×30. You can also follow her on Instagram at @annelaurewatercolor.

Five Questions for Anne-Laure about #30x30DirectWatercolor2018:

When you think about 30 days of daily practice – do you have a theme or a goal that might guide your work the month?

Anne-Laure: I don’t have any theme or subject in mind, I like to paint every subject possible and variety will be nice for the marathon!

I have a few things in my mind at the moments, though… To keep working on the balance between looseness and refinement in my style, to pay always more and more attention to value and maybe less and less to local color. To record my day to day life always more spontaneously with striking quick studies… I hope to live for a month a brush in the hand!!! (What an ambitious goal!! I also need to be at the computer to work on the videos ;) )

Are there any specific materials or techniques you plan to investigate? Will you use your reliable tools, or use this time to experiment with a new thing?

Anne-Laure: I think I will rely on my usual tools for the challenge. I am happy and at ease with my squirrel and sable brushes, my Fabriano cold press paper and my favorites colors (even if I try or try again a new one from time to time). I already have quite a spontaneous experimental style so I hope that the experiment will be more with the techniques than with the tools.

Hopefully, I will keep investigating on traditional techniques like the amount of water and pigment, the color combinations, the rendering of values, and on some more loose approaches like working wet-in-wet in some areas, using granulation, backruns, and splatters. There also are some techniques I want to try to use more in my watercolors like card scraping, sprayer bottle use. Oh, and flat brush painting as well. Hey, this is a tool to investigate with! ;)

Do you think 30×30 will be a challenge? Or is one painting a day easy for you?

Anne-Laure: I would like to keep it daily and this is going to be a challenge for me. I am a bit like – when I start painting, you can’t stop me anymore! I will often do 5 sketches in the day. But there is always this sort of weird resistance that makes it difficult to start. I might investigate on this resistance. I just can’t understand why it’s always so difficult to do something we love. Probably something related to fears and laziness (?!) but let’s investigate!

Even if I don’t manage to paint every day, I have a good hope to manage to make my 30 paintings or sketches. But let’s not count the chickens before they are hatched! :)

Let’s have a small tip! Give us a strategy people might use to reach the goal of 30×30?

Anne-Laure: I start with a list of ideas to maintain the interest and inspiration. So that I have a variety of options available. Working on cars, vegetables, street scenes, object still lives, botanical of plants. NB: I will probably be more specific than that.

Plus, why not a list of techniques or ideas associated to a subject?!… Something like “Trees and scraping”, “Backruns clouds”, “Light and shadows flat brush urban scene” “Negative painting trunks” etc. <great idea! ~m)

What do you hope have gained at the end of the 30-day marathon?

Anne-Laure: I hope to make gains in spontaneity and inspiration. Having, in a more straightforward way, an idea what I could do with a subject. Like – seeing potential subjects everywhere ;) and starting painting the next minute without overthinking it. Not accepting excuses like no time, not sure about it, no energy.

Related to that, I think about trying to be more and more confident with my watercolors. My confidence always goes up and down so if I can make it going up and having a nice high plateau, it would be quite nice!!

I want to feel at ease, to be loose without ending up with a mess, knowing when to stop without overworking it. (Haha, so many challenges! ;) Technically, I think I sometimes paint my mid values too dark, so I hope to find a good balance and intensity in my values.

But, let’s don’t have too many expectations! I’m looking forward to knowing how it turns out at the end. I hope I will have something to tell you about my progress!! ;)

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