Digital Watercolours

One thing about life aboard Hannah the Narrowboat is that the environment fosters creativity. Being away from the rat race that most people have to endure just to pay the bills gives you more time to think, more time to reflect and more time to be creative. As a musician and graphic artist I can not think of a better place to get inspiration from, yes it sounds a bit Mary Poppins but it's true. I now find myself taking more walks with my camera in hand, I find myself actually talking to strangers face to face unlike the current Facebook generation who have hundreds of 'friends' they have never seen or ever heard their actual voice. Most of us canal folk feel like we actually belong to a community.

Funnily enough I recently joined a narrowboat user group on Facebook and could not believe how friendly they all were, unlike many other interest groups I have joined and then left on the worlds largest gossip network. I decided that I would run a competition on there to see how many people would respond. It involved people sending in their own favourite photographs of their boat or canal scene and then I would pick what I thought was best and turn it into a digital watercolour using my iPad, a Wacom Creative Stylus and a few bits of app magic! The response was amazing considering I only ran it for around 7 hours. In the end I could not decide on a winner and ended up creating three watercolours! What I liked best was that people actually thought about it and did send in some beautiful pictures which goes to show that the canal folk truly are a creative bunch!

Here are the three watercolours I created for the winners.