Colourful Picasso Drawing

I am back from vacation (more of which soon!) and am trying to catch up on some of the art lessons and art time I missed out on while travelling.  It is impossible for me to catch up entirely so I have determined I will do 50% of the missed lessons and journal prompts.  That way it forces me to eke out some art time during this busy summer while not putting me under pressure.

I chose this Life Book lesson because it looked like I could easily fit it into a small chunk of time.  I did it in three stages – gesso, drawing, painting – but in total it probably took me about half an hour.  In the lesson, Misty Mawn used Picasso’s line drawing of a female head, part of his War and Peace series.  Normally I would do my own thing but a) I have always loved this Picasso drawing and b) I needed to just crack on with the art so this time I decided to use the same drawing as my starting point.  The drawing – done with Neocolor II crayons –  was quick to do.  The final stage was also quick and easy as I simply filled in the shapes with white paint, blending the crayon.  I usually use Neocolor as a layering element in mixed media pieces or as a sort of watercolour so it was new to me to use them to tint white paint.  I think I will use that technique again.

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Word Clouds Raining Rainbows

Last week I had ten minutes of art time.  Ten.  That’s all, folks.  In a week that included an unplanned hospital visit, house guests, and a funeral on top of all my usual commitments, obligations, and time suckers, I was not only pushed for free time but also brimming over with stress.  I felt like it might just save my sanity if I could find some way to dig out 20 minutes for art.  That turned out to be ambitious and I got 10.  Knowing I didn’t have time to do anything too involved, too messy, or too detailed, I turned to the Art Journal Adventure prompt and opened up my art journal to a blank page.

The prompt was to feature scallops on the page.  Yum.  Scallops.  I don’t think I have eaten any since I left Scotland.  Divine wee morsels that they are.  When I thought of scallops as a shape rather than a food, I thought of the way child-like clouds are drawn and that gave me the inspiration for my page.  With no time to draw or paint, I quickly cut out some scallop-fringed cloud shapes from old book pages and adhered them to the top of the page.  I then added stripes of Neocolor II crayons and outlined the clouds with Stabilo All.  Both of these activate with water so I sprayed liberal quantities of water on the page, then tipped up the art journal to let it all run and dribble and drip.  And that was my 10 minutes all used up.  I left it to dry overnight and was actually fairly satisfied with the result given the (lack of) time and effort invested in its creation.  And it just goes to show me that a) I can put together an entire art journal page in very little time indeed if I keep things simple and work efficiently and b) even a little bit of art time can balance out a stressful week.

Roots and Branches

For this week’s Life Book lesson, the tutor was Effy Wild.  The visual elements of the lesson were connected to some introspection but I mostly choose to gloss over the more art therapy aspects of Life Book and just focus on the art.  I also did not have time to view the video demonstrations so I relied on the accompanying PDF to provide me with an understanding of the steps involved.  As always, my finished outcome looks little like that of the tutor but I utilised techniques and approaches that she demonstrated.  I think the finished treeis reminiscent enough of a plump baobab tree that I wish I had thought of the resemblance sooner in the process and made it completely like a baobob.  It was at its core an exercise in patchwork collage and negative space.  I used bronze paint over the collage layer for the tree trunk and gold for the leaves so that it would glint in the light and because I look for any excuse to use metallic paints.  The tutor’s version incorporated text.  I wasn’t feeling that way inclined but do feel my piece lacks a focal point.  I just need to ruminate on it for a bit and return to it once I have an appropriate epiphany.