Meet Watercolor Artist Maria Ahl-Zanier
Ready to meet watercolor artist Maria Ahl-Zanier? She’s a fantastic watercolor artist living in a small town in the south of Sweden. She entered my world in 2019 because she wanted to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to turn her watercolor artwork into vectors.
Why?
Because when your artwork is vectorized, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. You can resize it, which is specifically what Maria wanted to do.
The video of my interview with Maria is over on my YouTube channel HERE. Please subscribe to my channel when you pop over there to watch it.
Here are a few key takeaways from this interview:
#1 – Let the water flow.
Maria creates beautiful and bold, loose watercolor artwork. She uses a lot of water, a large brush, and encourages her students to embrace the loose approach that she loves.
Something she says that really helps is remembering that creating a piece of art takes time. Watercolor is a process of painting and letting things dry. And then painting some more and letting it dry again.
#2 – Be patient.
That process of painting and letting it dry and doing that several times can be challenging for people like me who are eager to get to the finish line. LOL. I’ve discovered that working on several pieces at the same time helps me. It gives me something to do while one of the pieces is drying. You could, of course, just take a break and go for a walk instead.
#3 – Wait for it!
You really do need to be patient. You won’t know what the final result of your painting is until… it’s totally finished. This can be a bit of a circular reference. Meaning, do you really know when it’s “finished”?
What I mean is that it’s super important to not evaluate or look at your watercolor work with a critical eye until it is, really, finished. Along the way to being finished, it can look funny. Or you can start thinking: “Yuck! I don’t like what this is looking like.” But wait! Complete the process. The whole process. And you will probably be pleasantly surprised at the final outcome.
Interested in Maria’s new course: Painting a Dahlia? Check it out. You’ll love her teaching style and you’ll create a beautiful watercolor Dahlia painting.
Click HERE for all the details.
Bye for now, and I’ll see you next week!
xo,
Anne
P.S. Watch my video interview with Maria by clicking HERE. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel when you pop over there to watch it.
xo,
Anne
It’s Never Too Late to Create®
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MEET ANNE
Hi…I’m Anne!
My creative inspiration comes from a lifetime of observation. I grew up in Paris on the Place St. Sulpice and walked to school through the Luxembourg gardens. And that was only the beginning… Learn more by watching the video on my About page.
