365 Days of Art – New Books

….the last two days have been very busy

Days 13 and 14 are still brewing in my head. I haven’t yet learned to just grab my sketch book and draw whenever I have a spare moment or two. Today and part of yesterday I cleared away some of the Christmas ornaments and tidied up the house for my sister’s visit today. The unfortunate part was that I only spent about 20 minutes with her before my husband and I had to run off to attend a funeral out of town. I didn’t want her not to come because she had cancelled so many times since Christmas because of bad weather and I didn’t want my father to be disappointed if they cancelled again. When we got back from the funeral my father talked at length about the nice visit he had with my sister and her family. He took them all out for lunch before they had to head back home.

The funeral was out of town for a family member on my husband’s side. We’re glad we went. The service was pretty long but it was clear that our cousin’s husband was dearly loved. Afterwards it was nice catching up with some of the other cousins and promising that we would have a family reunion in the near future that wasn’t at a funeral parlour. Most of the day was spent driving to and from the funeral and spending four more hours at the memorial service.

Just before we left a parcel arrived at my door. On Friday I ordered two art books that were recommended by Evelyn Flint on her blog. Jill Kuhn also used the collage book and recommended doing the 50 collages challenge. The first book is called The Collage Workbook by Randel Plowman and the second one is Atmospheric Watercolour by Jean Haines. I’m looking forward to reading both books and am very excited about making more watercolour art. Stay tuned for more 365 Days of Art. img_0502.jpg

365 Days of Art – Collage – Day 12

…..thanks to Jill Kuhn who introduced me to The Collage Workbook

After reading Jill’s post today I was inspired to make some 5 minute collages. This is the first assignment in the The Collage Workbook by Randel Plowman. I’ve ordered the book and hope to work on my collage skills.

Here are four 5-minute collages.

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365 Days of Art – Mostly Red

…..day 10…playing with patterns

I’ve subscribed to Creative Bug for a few years now and I love the variety of classes you can take. There are knitting, quilting, watercolour, acrylic, sketching, photography, weaving and sewing classes, just to name a few. You can try it out for free and if you like it you can subscribe for about $6.00 a month. Classes that you really like you can hold in your own personal library to pull up whenever you want.

The latest class that I’m following is demonstrated by Lisa Congdon and I love her work. Every day for a month she is filming a video challenge on pattern drawing using watercolours or gauche. Yesterday I worked on a chevron pattern and a harlequin pattern.

https://www.creativebug.com/classseries/single/daily-painting-challenge-31-patterns-to-paint?auto=1

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365 Days of Art – Landscape on Yupo Paper

….day 8 of my year-long challenge

With this piece I tried to direct the thread to create a landscape. Tricky! I used acrylic inks again for the threading and watercolour to fill in the spaces. When you work on yupo paper you have little control over how the paint dries but then that’s one of the reasons why I like to work with it. This piece is also 9″ x 12″.

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365 Days of Art – Day 7

….I’m a day behind because my new computer was uploading 23 000 photos from the cloud

I’ve continued with the theme ‘threading lightly’ from Carla Sonheim’s year-long class. For this abstract piece I used yupo paper and inks for threading. I love the acrylic inks because they are so vibrant. I filled the spaces with watercolour. The piece is 9″x 12″.

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365 Days of Art – Day 6

…..today’s prompt was Blind Fruited

Carla Sonheim always comes up with interesting assignments. Instead of drawing a piece of fruit without looking at the paper (blind contour drawing), Carla wanted the fruit to be blindfolded. Here’s my blind apple. Enjoy!

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Oops, I dated this incorrectly. He should be Jan 6, 2018. I changed it on the original.

 

365 Days of Art – Day 5 Threading Lightly

….this comes from the first prompt of the new year long course that I am taking with Carla Sonheim

Threading lightly is a technique where you run cotton thread through wet watercolour and randomly lay it onto paper and press it with a brayer. We could leave it as an abstract piece or look for a shape within. I decided to find a shape and discovered this quirky duck. Tomorrow or later in the week I’m going to try this technique with ink and perhaps try a landscape.

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365 Days of Art – Day 4

….decided to switch it up a bit

Today I found some leaves pressed in one of my sketch books and I decided to use it as a collage element. I was also inspired by Herma from Studio Mastarre who draws very whimsical portraits. I haven’t tried to copy her style with today’s post but at some point I’d like to try my hand at it. I did use pencil to start with and I added some watercolour to finish.

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