Awards

Through time my paintings have won several prizes and awards but for the first time in my life my writing has also received recognition. Firstly I was given an honorable mention in a writing contest organized by the international Sistership Magazine based in Australia. The contest was eligible for women only and the theme was Facing your fears. Not only was it a writing contest but Sistership also published a book called Facing Fear Head On. The book consists of an anthology of short stories about fear written by 46 women on the water, from all over the world.
I felt it a great privilege that my essay “ What If” was included in the book. It is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Fear-Head-Stories-Women-ebook/dp/B07HFTQ7JM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544103864&sr=8-1&keywords=facing+fear+head+on

 In November I also received an honorable mention for an article called “Report from a sailing widow” I had written for the Swedish sailing magazine Odysse. Their motivation was: “A well written story about the authors development from passive passenger to competent captain on her boat Aquarella.”


Then, in this months Odysse magazine there was yet another of my watercolours reproduced to illustrate an article about the recent "medicane" in Greece. 

The latest full length video is now released!

I know I have promised this several times but here it is, actually finished at last!
This is the video I have been working on for months. Now called Sailing Through Watercolours the 71 minute film closely follows my work as I paint four different watercolours. Three of the paintings were done in the heat of the summer on board my boat in Greece and one in the middle of winter on a frozen beach in Sweden.
This is my fourth film produced for Pulsar Productions in Australia. They source the best art instruction DVDs and films from all over the world and it is a great honour to work with them. The full length video can be bought to watch online and download via Vimeo as VOD ( video on Demand) or as a DVD disc.
http://www.pulsarproductions.com/

The trailer for the film can be seen here:

Trailer

The cover for the DVD which is produced in both PAL and NTSC versions

At sea, on land and in the air.

The watercolours I painted in the four months I stayed on board "Aquarella"
during the summer of 2018

Painting under the sunshade in the cockpit

rowing over to a nearby wreck to paint from my dinghy.
Screenshot from a video taken with the
GoPro from half way up Aquarellas mast.

Working on a watercolour in the cabin

Creating works of art on a rocking boat isn't easy. Some days are more difficult than others, but the inspiration I find so near at hand is hard to beat. In a strong wind when the boat is constantly rocking it is difficult to keep a steady hand for the detailed work. I often choose to do something else then and wait until everything calms down. Sometimes there's a dead calm until suddenly a motorboat charges by at full speed and violently rocks the boat in it's wake. I swear then but it doesn't help.

Enjoying the company of friends on board.
Two giggling girls; me and  Katinka.

But I have not only been painting watercolours this summer. As I mentioned before, I am writing a book about painting the sea. This has been a gigantic project which is still unfinished but I am getting there. I have had the kind help of friends; The successful Swedish author Katinka Bille who came aboard and gave me a lot of good advice about my project.
Then my friend Sarah Atkins, who is an English teacher from the UK, has taken on the task of proof reading the whole manuscript, which is no easy job. So I hope to be able to publish the book in the not so distant future.
Another project I have been working on, in between painting and writing, is producing a new video about my work. I filmed with a Mavic pro drone, a GoPro, a Canon EOS5D, my ipad, iphone and a small Sony cybershot with a good zeiss lens. But it isn't the filming that takes time, it's the editing. I am still working on that....

Rusty Wreck

A selfie I took from my dinghy
while I photographed the wreck

The finished painting Rusty Wreck © Elizabeth Tyler 2018

I studied a similar plaited rope to get the pattern right.
The rope on the wreck was miscoloured,
frayed and worn but the plaiting was the same. 

A few years ago I painted another watercolour of this rusty wreck and felt it was very inspiring. I wanted to do more then but never got back to it. From the buoy my boat is moored to now (Poros, Greece) it´s not very far away so I thought I would give it another try.
I anchored up at what I considered a safe distance from the wreck but couldn’t see the details I wanted from there so I took my dinghy over to get some close up shots with my camera.
With the help of these and the fresh memory of  the subject I could begin painting under the sunshade over my cockpit.

Steps 1,2 and 3.
At first I masked the area where the ropes would be.
A rough idea of the different colours was then painted wet into wet.
In step two I simulated the rusty hull with dots, blobs and shavings from a watercolour pencil.
In step three I pulled the masking of and started the tedious work with the ropes

True Colours

 Back at my mooring buoy in Poros, Greece I have spent days working on a new watercolour. 

I wanted to do something different this time and walked around the shoreline looking for subject matter. Just as I was about to give up I stumbled upon this scene. A guy in a camper van had hung out his washing between the trees at the waters edge. In the background was an old boat moored to a tiny jetty. The wind played with the washing giving it life and the sun enhanced the bright colours of the clothes and foliage.

I made a sketch and decided to mask all the washing in order to work freely with the background. The sketch was in fact quite detailed as I didn’t want to forget anything. This was done en plein air (on location) but I took photographs to continue with it back at my boat. It turned out I used the wrong masking fluid ( it was written in Russian) So I ripped the whole sketch up in anger and started right from the beginning!

The sketch with masked and taped
 the outlines of the washing

The first colours of the foliage were added

ultramarine and cobalt blue were used for the sea
and shadows between the leaves give the scene some depth

I added burnt sienna to the tree trunk and foreground

Now it was time to remove the mask

As a base colour for the boat and
some of the washing I used magenta red

Finally the last details of the washing were painted  and the grass in the foreground was added.

Greetings from Fabriano watercolour festival (with video)

On the way to Fabriano with my travelling companion
the danish artist Heidi Andersen.

This year's international watercolour festival FabrianoInAcquarello in the small town of Fabriano Italy was truly an amazing event. There were 1400 participants, many in person, from 70 different countries. It was such a wonderful experience to meet so many interesting people, all with a mutual love of watercolour. Throughout every day workshops, demos and courses were held. The paintings were exhibited in historical buildings throughout the ancient town. There were even night time demos with live classical music and excursions to nearby attractions with time to paint and well worth visiting.

An experiment I did at a workshop about using
synthetic paper, lead by the artist Didier Brot.
I called the painting "Memory of a wave"

Watercolour painted between rain showers

"The painters" A quick sketch of my
colleagues painting the view from the village of Genga

I used a drone to capture some arial footage of the small towns
in the mountains we visited.
This is a shot of myself captured from the drone before take off.

Painting at Serra San Quirico

Me working on a watercolour of the view over Fabriano

Paintings by the participating artists from England

"A walk in shallow water" my painting
exhibited at the festival Fabriano In Acquarello 2018

click here to see My video with scenes from this years Fabriano in Acquarello

I have been making so many amazing new friends from 

all over the world in Italy. The most unlikely encounter happened
on a tiny mountain road at the village of Serra San Quirico.
I was walking along admiring the view when I was stopped
by this beautiful lady Babita Johri Saxena from Bangalore
“ Are you Elizabeth Tyler?” she asked and told me she had been
seeing my videos on YouTube for years and recognised me from them.
I didn’t know I was world famous!
We had a nice chat and she made me promise to upload more videos soon.

My painting as magazine cover

 My watercolour painting is now on the cover of the quarterly Swedish sailing magazine Odyssé
I was asked to write an article for the magazine  about my background and my adventures, trials and tribulations as a solo sailing artist in Greece.
After seeing the article the editors asked me if they could also use one of my paintings on the cover. Although the watercolour had to be cropped to fit the A4 format I am very pleased with the result.

The article I wrote is in Swedish but there is a summery in English

Another article was published in the magazine by the author Katinka Bille who wrote about about my lecture in Gothenburg and an interview with the renowned yachtswoman Christine Schildt. In both an editorial and article Claes Wessberg wrote about my talk in the Mediterranean Sailing Association at Lomma. 

The Famous Blue Raincoat

"Its coming in to land - No not there! - No, not yet! - Oh no! - Oh yes, -phew!"

Using a table cloth as launching pad for the Mavi pro.
photo: Appe Alm

I’ve been meaning to update this blog for some time but I really find the art of multitasking quite challenging. When I am absorbed in the process of a painting I can’t break off my train of thought to write anything and vice versa, so it all takes time.

My recent project has been to produce a new video about painting watercolours on the beach. I decided to drive to my favourite beach at Kullaberg where there are steep cliffs, lots of stones, rocks and seaweed. For the new video I wanted to send a drone up to film the whole scene from above. I had bought a new drone, a Mavic Pro (after my first one was lost at sea) and persuaded my friend Appe Alm to come with me as drone pilot to take control of the remote. Not an easy task, as neither of us had tried it before. We did a trial run near home first and took it in turns to launch, fly, turn round and land in “beginner mode”

Starting the painting with large brushstrokes.

Then I put on five layers of clothes and took all my art materials, camera equipment, coffee and sandwiches and off we went. On location the temperature was zero degrees so both flight time (cold battery) and painting time ( freezing fingers) were limited. However I got started on the painting and could work on the basic shapes and preliminary composition.

Filling in the details

I borrowed some of the stones from the beach ( they will be returned later) and some seaweed to take home and continue there. 
The work in progress was filmed step by step. It took a long time so the seaweed started to smell and was thrown out. A whole month went by before the weather was suitable to continue filming and painting again.

Me, from the drone, in my famous blue raincoat

( the tiny blue spot by the rocks)

The actual video will be published later when I have finished the long process of editing. (The art of multitasking again)

Drifted Ashore   watercolor 54 x 75 cm
 © Elizabeth Tyler 2018