….on day 2 of Sketchbook Revival we meet Leanne Oliver and Sarah Matthews

Leanne walked us through an exercise she calls Cracks in the Road. She loves to make marks in her paintings and she finds that this process helps her with her art. The steps involved wetting some watercolour paper and adding a little bit of neutral acrylic paint over part of the surface. Then she took a charcoal pencil and drew lines from a photograph of cracks in the road. Then she wet the lines so that the charcoal would bleed out a bit. After that she took Gesso and applied a coat over some of the areas and while it was still wet she went over the lines again but this time with pencil. Then she added some colour using a soluble coloured pencil or pastels and more water.

The whole process was a lot of fun and I can see how I might use this technique in my next painting. Here are the two samples that I did.

Sarah Matthews is a print maker and she makes her own stamps. I thought I had a block of material to carve into but I’ve either used it or couldn’t find it. I’m hoping to order some more so that I can try her art lesson at a later date. Stay tuned for that one.