Welcome to Hazel Scott Art!

Hello from sunny Cebu City! Welcome to my new site!

My name is Hazel Scott. I'm a website project manager by profession, and after work and family duties, I like to photograph food and paint plants (currently in that order).

While I've had quite a few gigs doing my photography, I consider myself an art newbie. I started painting when I was 14, using Tulco fabric paint on handmade canvas bags (me and my mom sewed them) and plain white tees, which I all sold to friends. I was completely self-taught, so a lot of my methods were crude, usually 3x more tedious than was necessary (an example here), and resulted in many pieces that didn't stick around too gracefully. But it was fun, and I'd get lost in a painting, not getting up, or doing much of anything else for periods as long as 5 hours! Also, people paid me what I considered a great return for my otherwise cheap student time. I painted pretty regularly for the next 5 years or so, until university, family life and adulting ate up nearly all my time.

Then I discovered photography and met many kind people who provided me with great gear, so taking pictures of festivals, markets and food became my main medium of expression from 2008 onwards. This interest paved the way to creating my food blog (below is a photo of my Carrot Squash and Coconut Soup, recipe on PinayWorkingMom.com). Sadly, I have not been able to maintain it very well. Discovering watercolors in June 2016 has not helped with that, but I'm not sad about that bit. On the contrary, I'm extremely thrilled at having rediscovered my love for painting.

Watercolors are a completely different beast from my good old fabric paints. Color mixing is a very dissimilar affair and I particularly struggled with the concept of not using white, or using black very little, if not mixing it from the exact primaries you are using in your painting in order to ensure color harmony. The opacity of the fabric paints I used was something I took for granted as part of the paint's property and I'm needing to unlearn it to grasp the transparent beauty of watercolors. I'm also very eager to still awaken some opaque paint skills by trying out acrylic and oil paint, two mediums I've not had a proper encounter with as of this writing.

This blog is here to share my journey of rediscovering painting. I will admit that I felt major hesitation in starting yet another blog, but I've set my 2017 goal to be "Just do!" So, here we go!

I will aim to post twice a month, and it will be a mix of blogs, photos and videos, which will be about methods I learn that I'd like to share, photos/videos of the art materials I get and my thoughts on them, and the occasional giveaway that my husband and I will do to support other artists.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you drop by often. I'd also love to hear from you, so please feel free to leave comments on my posts. If you would like to be alerted of new posts and giveaways, please subscribe using the form below.