Matchstick

On Friday – thanks to another dose of snow because this Winter is apparently never going to end – the school district gifted my kids with a delayed arrival and an early dismissal.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Both ends of the day were curtailed meaning they were in school for a whopping two hours and twenty minutes.  My four kids attend three different schools, each of which operates on a different schedule.  This staggering meant that my youngest had not long since gone to school before my oldest arrived home again.  Meanwhile, I still had to go to work on my regular schedule but with extra Dr Seuss party fun thrown into the mix which meant I was dressed as the Cat in the Hat all day.  I got some very peculiar looks and a few chuckles from the other parents at pick up time at my youngest’s school.  So, yes, Friday was a bit of a stressful day and that meant that, when I got home that afternoon, I decided to sit at my art table to decompress – and fortunately my late afternoon schedule was flexible since all my kids were home by that point.

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “Flame”.  Fire and ashes have been recurring themes in my art journal.  This time I thought about a figure representing a matchstick.  I used orange and yellow ink for the background, letting the ink do its thing in wet paper to create random forms and puddles of pigment and hopefully suggest flames.  My Daniel Smith Lunar Black was the perfect paint for the torso of the figure since the way it granulates and separates was so reminiscent of a struck, burned out match.

 

Rainbow Art Journal – Flame Sprite

In addition to being a place for creative play and experimentation, I am aiming for my Rainbow Art Journal to be a record of what I can do with the various art materials and media I own.  This page, therefore, is a record of how three of the Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers interact with each other.  Consequently, I knew that I wanted to produce an illustration that was splotchy and liquidy and involved puddles and blossoms of pigment.  I decided that flame would be the perfect subject for such an experiment in the orange section of the journal so I chose to draw a flame sprite.  The page got very wrinkled from all the liquid media but I am happy with the final outcome.  I think she is a pleasing wee character and I got some lovely interactions between the different watercolour markers.

 

Phoenix Woman

This week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Tamara Laporte.  I knew it would be very detailed and would spark my creativity and imagination and get me rushing to put paint on paper right away and I was not wrong.  The object of the lesson was two-fold: to work with a full profile; and to balance out working on two sides of a painting in two different ways, intentionally in one area and intuitively in another, and make the two sides cohere.  Since I find working intuitively challenging and I also sometimes struggle to make backgrounds complement the focal image, I thoroughly enjoyed this lesson.

Laporte’s exemplar in the video tutorials was of a female figure with a swan on her head and some other whimsical, fantastical elements.  We were encouraged, however, to find and utilise imagery that chimed with us.  I already had an idea that I wanted to use red and other warm colours in a painting because I have not been using those colours much lately so perhaps that is where the idea of a phoenix came from.  Perhaps it is also because it is my birthday today and I am now 40 and waiting for the whole “life begins” thing to kick in, the next chapter in my life.  My version is a bit less whimsical than Laporte’s and I didn’t use doodles or writing or symbols but I did use spatter and dribble and dots which make me happy.  I am really pleased with how this painting turned out especially when I compare it to how my adventures in mixed media painting started this year.