Three Craws Sat Upon A Wa’

This past week was shaping up to be another in which I did absolutely zero art.  I keep waiting for a week where my schedule is more flexible but in vain.  I used to stay up late working on art but I have been too exhausted for that malarkey these past few months.  I need to figure something out.  Solutions on a postcard, please.  Happily, however, on Sunday I met up with some local art friends and had a couple of hours in a coffee shop to work on my art journals.  I had an idea of what I wanted to work on.  However, I left the house in such a whirlwind that I left most of my travel art supplies sitting at home on my art table.  I, therefore, had to come up with an idea of something I could work on with very limited supplies.

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was something along the lines of the number 3.  Not too long ago, I had a blog comment exchange with Claudia McGill about the Scottish children’s song “Three Craws Sat Upon A Wa'” and I assume that having that so recently in my brain meant that I came up with the idea of writing out the lyrics of the song and illustrating it with three crows.  Despite being complimented all the time about my handwriting, my typography remains reliably awful.  I decided to write in a childlike print for this page, given it was the lyrics of a childhood song, which should have theoretically made it easier to set out the placement of the words on the page.  Regardless of the theory, in practice my writing went on all over the place with drifting away from the margin and that final word becoming isolated on the bottom line because of my inability to compose the text on the page.  I guess writing in art journals remains a challenge for me.  I am happier with the crow illustrations.  Sure, they look a bit derpy and goofy but I like them.  Having drawn the crows with waterproof micron pens, I used an aquapen brush marker to outline the shapes and then grabbed a water brush to spread the pigment out.  I have seen people obtain beautiful results with water activated brush markers but clearly I am not there yet with my level of experience with them.  I think the scrappy quality works well for depicting scruffy crows, however.  Let’s go with that.