Rainbow Wing

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “wing it”.  Finding time for art this week was a major challenge.  We are all adjusting to a new routine.  My four kids are in three different schools; the oldest has to catch a bus half an hour earlier than last year, which means pulling our morning routine half an hour earlier.    It’s a chaotic transition period.  I feel like I am either chasing my tail constantly or trying to catch myself up throughout the whole day.  Exhaustion is the dominant theme of my life right now.  We will keep tweaking things until we get the schedule running like a well oiled machine but, until then, my free time for art is severely curtailed.

Therefore, “winging it” is exactly what I did with this journal page.  I decided to not put much thought or planning into it, to just use my art journal as a decompression tool and enjoy the process rather than focusing on the outcome.  Winging it made me think of bird wings and feathers so that gave me my subject.  To ensure that I didn’t get too fussy or tight with my drawing, I decided to “wing it” again: I dipped a chubby paint brush in black acrylic and drew the wing with my non-dominant hand.  In retrospect, using my left hand maybe wasn’t the best idea.  After filling in the negative space with black acrylic and letting the whole thing dry, it was time to add colour.  I did so by just splashing some pigment rich watercolour paints into the feather shapes and letting it run all over the place.

It is just as well that I was not focused on the outcome because the outcome is pretty rubbish really.  My ten year old tactfully told me it was “not the best”.  I like the idea of a wing made of rainbow feathers and might return to that at some stage.  This page, however, is what it is.  I “winged it” for sure.

Female Form Silhouette

It has taken me almost two weeks to complete this Let’s Face It lesson but I’ve done it.  It took me almost a week just to find time to watch the lesson video and then, despite skipping some steps of the process demonstrated, it took me a further week to get the piece completed.  The lesson was taken by Deanna Strachan-Wilson and was about creating a simplified form of a female figure in a layered piece.  One of the corners I cut was in not drawing a figure based on a photograph and instead drawing from my imagination.  As such, my proportions are not realistic and I very much simplified the profile of the face plus I added a wing to balance out the composition.  I actually preferred my piece before I added gesso to the figure but I wanted to try and stay true to the methods of the lesson where I could since I had jettisoned other steps.  I do, however, like the warm, grungy sepia, vintage tones of the piece and especially the washes of bronze and the spatters of gold.