Week 12 already

The art challenges are almost a quarter of the way through - already!! I was a bit slower this week doing the Journal 52 pages as I needed to wait for them to dry in between layers, but I finished them yesterday and got my collage done today.

Colour Me Positive Week 12 - Expanding

This week's quote: "Until you spread your wings, you'll never know how far you can fly", and we were asked to exlpore trying to achieve goals and to use wings on our page. My seahorse sort of has wings - if you've ever seen one swimming, the action of their fin looks like a wing.

I splotched paint in blues and purples with a touch of yellow and green for the background, before I used some of my new stamps. The first one with seaweed, coral & shells, was stamped on the page and on a piece of tracing paper which I reversed before sticking to the page. I coloured these with my brush markers. Then I stamped the seahorse, drew in the fin/wing and painted it yellow and orange.

I used my favourite quote from Katherine Hepburn: "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun." I thought it was appropriate as seahorses break rules by having the male carry the eggs and give birth, and they are such improbable looking animals!

Journal 52 Week 12 - Emulate / Duplicate

So this week, Effy thought we should do a page in the style of our favourite artist (emulate) and Sarah, thought we should copy directly trying to get as close to the original as possible (duplicate). I went with "Emulate" and combined a couple of Mimi Bondi's pages from her book "No Shenanigans".

The first part was dropping some paint on the page and pressing another page against it. When dry, you do it again with different colours. Some splotches end up quite wet, so these pages took a while to dry. I then added more colour using my fingers to cover the empty spots.

Next I added some squiggly lines with grey and white paint, circles in white and yellow, and lots of splatters in white, pink and yellow. It looked like a party, so that's the quote I went with: "Life is a party - Live life to the full".

Collages - L

This time I went with two words - "Lures and Lepidoptera". A catalogue arrived a couple of weeks ago with lots of fishing lures - they were so colourful that I tore the page out. I was looking for L words and came across "lepidopterous" and then went looking for picture of butterflies. I found some in my father's old Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, which I've scanned so I can use them again.

It seemed only sensible to combine the two in a page!

I hope you are all having a Happy Easter. Don't eat too much chocolate tomorrow. Cheers.

Busy, Long Weekend

It's a long weekend here in Melbourne with our Moomba Festival running. We tend to forget that the holiday is actually Labour Day with its origins in the eight hour day movement. Anyway, I for one, have been hard at work this weekend.

Colour Me Positive Week 10 - Beauty

We were encouraged to remember that we are beautiful inside and out with the quote "Every piece of you is a burst of something beautiful",  and to use flowers on our page. I immediately thought of the garden and using one of my many photos as a basis for the page, but in the end used three stencils to make my page.

For the background, I sprayed with distress stain in purple, mustard, olive and a splash of red. This was sprayed with water and encouraged to flow down and across the pages. Even though I had gessoed the pages, it still leaked through, but luckily did not spoil my previous page. I then used a trellis stencil with modelling paste to give the page some texture (see detail below).

I used a combination of graphite pencil and coloured pencil to outline the trellis effect and suggest a climbing frame. The modelling paste dried clear, showing the colour of the stains used.

Next I stenciled the leaves using three shades of green, followed by the rose stencil using red, pink and cream. The words were printed on parchment, cut and pasted onto the page - and this time, I did use the quote supplied.

Colour Me Positive Week 11 - Intuition / Journal 52 Week 11 - Favourite Creature

It amazes me how often these two challenges have similar themes. CMP this week offered a meditation by Chrissy Foreman Cranitch to help us find our animal totem. I didn't think that I was getting anywhere with the meditation when in strolled a stately giraffe, right on cue - so I had to include one in my page.

The quote for CMP is "Trust your Intuition", and/or use an animal on your page. Meanwhile over at Journal 52, Effy Wild was asking us to create a page that honours your favourite animal. So that meant a search of the WWW  to find a suitable image - which I did on National Geographic.

I drew the giraffe freehand, then covered the page in gesso to get rid of the stain that had leaked through from the previous page - luckily I could still see my pencil drawing! A light wash of watercolour was used to define sky and land, before I got to work with my coloured pencils.

Collages - K

I thought I might use keys or knobs for this one, but decided on "Knick-Knacks" as I knew that I had tons of source material in my Daphne magazines. It's a bit of a challenge in itself to find a word to use, that I know I can get images for.

Well, wherever you are (even if you didn't have a long one) I hope you had a productive weekend like I did. Hope you enjoy my offerings. Cheers.

Almost too hot to work

Today (Tuesday 8 March) it reached 41° C where I live!! It is meant to be Autumn with temperatures cooling down and leaves starting to turn red and gold. Summer is hanging on with a vengeance this year, with more days over 30° C expected and little relief in sight.

One thing it is not, is too hot to make art. (At least, not yet!)

Colour Me Positive Week 9 - PLAYFUL

So this week, CMP is all about play with the quote "Live like a grown up, play like a child" - Mimi Bondi, and the option of using circles on our page. In the spirit of the challenge, I watched a couple of Mimi Bondi's YouTube videos and tried my hand at some finger-painting.- it was fun and I got to try out the new colours that I bought last week. You can find Mimi's channel here:  http://www.youtube.com/mimibondi.

And of course, I chose a different quote: "Every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up" - Pablo Picasso.

Journal 52 Week 9 - Things you love / Things you hate

I did the "Dislike" page first and forgot to paint a background before I stuck my bits down, so I swished a bit of ink around and generally made a mess.

For the "Like" page, I prepped with the new black gesso I bought and wrote using Signo metallic pens. Very quick and easy because really the topics didn't really grab me.

Journal 52 Week 10 - Emerge / What lies beneath

I went with the "Emerge" prompt this week, but turned it one its head - instead of emerging from winter into spring/summer, my page is about how we are trapped in summer and trying to emerge into autumn/winter.

The words (which are my own) read: "The long hot summer refuses to release its grip so that we can EMERGE into the cool embrace of autumn and winter".

This one was also finger-painted - in red, orange and brown, but toned down with gesso - before being over-painted with other colours. The figure was drawn freehand.

Collages - J

J is my favourite letter being the first letter of my name, and I had lots of interesting words - but some of them would have been hard to find images for. As soon as I thought of "Jaundiced", the colour yellow came to mind as that is the colour skin takes on when someone has jaundice. So all the images are of yellow things!!

So that's everything that I have done since the last post. I hope you enjoy your visit - bye for now.