Rainbow Art Journal – The Girl with Words in her Hair

Thanks to a weekend that for once was not crammed with activities or commitments, I found time to work in my colour themed art journal.  I am still in the black/monochrome pages and this time I wanted to play around with using the black and white of printed text.  Readers who follow both my blogs might recognise the model for this page as being a drawing – titled Aubrey because of Aubrey Beardsley – from my series of 100 Faces.  I thought it would be interesting to see if I could recreate a face I had illustrated in ink and watercolour using acrylic paint and collage.  There is definitely more precision in the ink drawn version but I am not displeased with the way this mixed media piece turned out.  I do like the hair made of book pages so that was a worthwhile experiment.

Layered Blooms

This month’s Life Book theme of Growth has meant lots of flower paintings.  I am not remotely competent at drawing flowers let alone painting them.  While this means I should probably just challenge myself to practice them, I don’t have time for all of the things I want to draw and paint so I just steer clear of the subjects that don’t particularly engage or inspire me creatively.  Recognising, however, that I have now skipped a few Life Book lessons, I decided to push myself to completing last week’s lesson.

It was taken by Roben-Marie Smith and was all about creating an abstract flower painting through layering collage and paint.  When I started experimenting with mixed media, layering was something I really struggled with.  I made a lot of mud, a lot of mess, and found it difficult to make everything cohere into one complete piece.  In recent months, however, I have found myself actually quite enjoying layering and especially if what I am aiming to achieve is a more grungy and abstract look.  I, therefore, did not struggle with the layering aspect of this piece but again the flower element defeated me.  I honestly think my 7 year old son could have done a better job of painting these flowers.  Sure, I was aiming for an abstract, non-realistic flower look but these bright blooms just look daft.  Well the lesson was worth doing if only to reinforce that I am getting better at layering and that flowers are still very much not within my wheelhouse.