Art Challenges - Weeks 3 & 4

Well inspiration did eventually hit for the week 3 challenges, but it was weak and I ended up using the same piece for both challenges.

Colour Me Positive Week 3 - LIVE LIFE

This week's quote was "Make today so awesome that yesterday gets jealous" - focusing on how we can make today the best day possible. The alternative challenge was to use some song lyrics on your page.

So I went with song lyrics and chose Carole King's "Beautiful" which is one of my favourites. My page started with a very wet acrylic wash which I smooshed on the facing page, ending up with a sort of marbled effect. I glued paper napkin paper to the page with white paint - I find this better than dealing with glues or sticky mediums. Spotted pattern on the bottom, a vase cut out of a blue & white napkin, then a rounded shape from a napkin featuring balloons.

I then painted over the balloons in co-ordinating colours and turned them into flowers, painted some stems and leaves to fill the spaces, and then wrote the words of the song's first verse around the picture.

 Journal 52 Week 3 - Song Lyrics / Favourite Bowie Lyrics

Quite weird that both of the challenges included song lyrics this week. I could not pick a favourite Bowie song and nothing at all popped into my head while trawling though lyrics on the WWW, so I decided to just post the page I had done for CMP. This photo shows some detail of  the texture obtained by using the napkins underneath the painting.

 Colour Me Positive Week 4 - Believe in Yourself

So the smooshing on the facing page just looked a bit drippy, but I could a vague face in the paint, so I sketched it out. I decided to use my watercolour pencils for this portrait even though I find them challenging to work with. Sometimes when you add water they disappear, other times the lines of colouring in show too much. I can't seem to get it right.

Also the paint on the page gave her face a splotchy look which I could not get rid of. Should have used paint!!

Journal 52 Week 4 - Full Moon / Moon Madness

So Effy wanted us to explore the full moon in our pages and Sarah wanted us to explore moon madness or lunacy. That's a bit weird because this weekend I just re-read Nora Roberts "Northern Lights" which is set in the fictional town of Lunacy!!!!

Anyway, I found this great quote "The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand" and this image just popped into my head. The moon was made using crackle medium with battleship grey underneath and cream on top - although it didn't crackle much. The silhouette was traced from a magazine and the background painted with a mixture of paynes grey (looks dark blue to me), medium grey and pacific blue.

I am really pleased that I was able to translate what I had in my head onto the page.

Collages - C

The word is CAVALCADE and I had to resort to printing images from the internet to get enough for the page. I coloured the spaces with Faber-Castell Brushmarkers.

That's it for now - thanks for visiting.