Brusho Workshop with Joanne Boon thomas

Have had a really brilliant day at a Brusho workshop led by

Joanne Boon Thomas

Some of you may know of Joanne as she has just done a series of DVD's

Expressive Watercolour Florals

for the Art Tutor venture

Art Tutor

Here is a link to the Brusho Secrets website where you can also get Joanne's recent Book and DVD about Brusho... check my review you won't be disappointed!!

You will find some of her demos on youtube.... she's had about 50,000 hits in a very short space of time and can assure you the DVD's are excellent as I have previewed some of them on ID&P.

So what is Brusho...... it's an interesting product....... a powder pigment which sort of explodes when sprayed with water.... as you can imagine I was just a little bit excited (well more like beside myself!!!) when I saw all the effects you could achieve with this stuff.

Joanne has a very easy, encouraging style,  her passion for watercolour shines through and her enthusiasm for this product was infectious....... not that I needed much encouragement!!!! It is a very versatile but unpredictable medium so the whole workshop was punctuated by lots of ooohs and ahhhs, not just from me by the way, and Joanne generously shared hints and tips which she has taken years of experimenting to discover. Thank you for that Joanne.

Just a few photos of the day. Joanne guided us through a few ways of applying the pigment to the paper and we then went on to do one or two washes, just playing and learning how to use with the water.   The next demo was a floral using an initial wash of brusho showing us how to build up the details with negative painting, splattering and the odd application of bleach,. The final piece was a woodland scene. Although brusho very much lends itself to florals Joanne wanted to show us it can be used for any subject..... the effects are brilliant and even though some of us did overwork and as always it wasn't as easy as Joanne made it look can see there is endless potential in this product and will definitely be adding it to my very limited repertoire of medium which at the moment comprises watercolour, watercolour and more watercolour!!!

This was my go at the floral.... tulips, more work needed on this but think you can see them developing, especially top left. Have used bleach and wax crayon on this and I am liking how this is going so will see what develops.....

Finally the woodland scene... not sure about this as it is, but the beauty is I can go back in especially now it is dry and keep working it for as long as the paper will stand it. The bleach is a revelation and can be splattered, applied with a brush and then painted over and can rescue those oh so annoying painted over white bits!!!!!!! Forgot to say, brusho can also be mixed to use like watercolour but one of the main differences is the vibrancy you get. As you will all know watercolour fades as it dries whereas there is much less fading with this from the initial application so all in all am a very happy bunny today!!!

Big thank you to Joanne, her workshop was fun, relaxed, informative, I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed myself!!!