Week 49 of 365 Challenge Pen Week

Pen week mmm, when I realized last week what this weeks theme was, I groaned out loud. I'm surprised you didn't hear me lol. This week turned out to be a good week though. 

My kids are home from school for two weeks holiday and we've spent a fun week watching movies and playing games together. Even catching my son's head cold hasn't bothered me too much. Hopefully they will chase away the winter blues completely before they go back to school. My kids are great like that.

Pic one is of my gel pens that I use for journaling. I have two sets of seven colors that I bought just before we moved house a year ago. 

I don't think I've used them this year at all though. I'm happy writing in my journal with a blue or black pen at the moment but I have no urge to sketch anything in there with the writing. I've just discovered that over the years I have either painted/sketched or taken photos. I don't seem to do both together. So if I'm working on a painting project I don't touch my camera and if like now I'm working on a photography project my art muse disappears. If I have no set projects on the go, I swing easily between the two without a thought. I have no idea why.

Pic two is of my daughter's pen that her Grandma brought her back from her last trip to Scotland to visit Great Grandma.

Pic three is of some of my Pitt Artist's pens. I like the sepia color and have this color pen in both fine and brush tips.

Pic four is of a group of pens that I have sketched with in the past. I did trials with various pens in my art journal to see which pens are water resistant, fade resistant etc. I like keeping a mixture of water resistant and non-water resistant pens around. Sometimes it's nice to 'paint' with water over a non-water resistant pen to add shading to a sketch and other times I prefer to use water color paints over the pen so don't want the pen to bleed.

Pic five is of my daughter's pen cup with her favorite four color pen sitting above the rest.

Pic six is of a pen I bought from Avon to fund-raise for breast cancer.

Pic seven is of my daughter's connector felt tip pens.

Next week is Red week. 

Have a great week :)

Serendipity

Sometimes the slightest things change the direction of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark - Bryce Courtenay

I can hardly believe that a whole month has passed since I last wrote a blog post here, it only seems like last week that I was making my mini watercolor painting kit. It seems I'm now on that fast slippery slide that leads to Christmas and all the fun and mayhem that creates. I've made some great discoveries and painted a lot of color test sheets and tried some new watercolor techniques too over the past month. By far though, the best thing that's happened artwise has been the lucky discovery of a great Facebook sketching group. 

Back in April I borrowed a fantastic book from my local library called "Artist's Journal Workshop" by Cathy Johnson. http://www.amazon.com/Artists-Journal-Workshop-Creating-Pictures/dp/1440308683 

This book changed my life and I'm going to buy my own copy as a Christmas present to myself. This book is what started me on my creative journey back to art after 26 years and what started me blogging here in the first place. This book really has changed my life and this past month I discovered that there was a Facebook group of the same name running.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/artists.journal.workshop/ 

It's full of friendly, encouraging, wonderful, inspiring people who I've learned so much from in such a short time. 

I've learned a lot about color, equipment, and technique but by far the most important lesson I've learned is that it's a long, lonely road when you walk it on your own but a wonderful fun filled trip when you have other like minded people to share it with.

 Up until now I haven't done anything about finding other people in my town that like sketching or painting and I've had trouble keeping up a routine of working in my journal. Having this online group to share with has been great, seeing other people's work has sparked ideas for drawings of my own and I find that I'm more inclined to draw if I'm going to be able to share it with someone when it's finished. I guess my next step now will be to try to find other people that live in my area that I can go on sketch trips with. Something that I would never have thought of doing before joining this group. 

My concept of what art is or can be and my enjoyment level has totally changed and so I thought I would share my found treasures with you so that you too can maybe find a reason to pick up a pencil and see the world through new eyes :)

The picture of Buddha is painted in non-permanent black gel pen and watercolor paint for the shrubs.

Have a great week :)

How do you work?

"The reason that art (writing, engaging, and all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map." - Seth Godin

Today I thought I would blog about how I get a sketch ready to paint. I'm always curious about other artist's workflows and I would love to hear how you work too. Feel free to leave a comment here.

I have two ways of working when I sketch.

If the sketch itself is the focus I tend to focus on the detail. I draw out my rough sketch first and then refine the shapes and add the details as I go. Shading and crosshatching to bring out the form. All the drawing is my own work with no shortcuts.

However;

            

If the painting is my main focus I only draw in an outline of the basic subject and paint in the detail as I go. If it is a landscape I may even just start straight into the painting and just roughly guess the scale as I paint. But if the painting is of something detailed that really needs to be in proportion I might even go as far as to trace an outline of the subject from my photograph just to get it done quicker because the sketch itself was never the focus of the work. (I'm even more likely to do this if I've already painted a small scale version and just want to quickly start on the full size piece. It's sheer laziness really but I drew it once already so why do I have to start from scratch again? I learned to work this way at school.)

I know this may sound like cheating and I guess it is in a way, but I know plenty of other painters that work this way. Some absolutely hate to draw or can't draw and the painting is the art for them. Some even project their image outline onto their canvas using projectors, or print it out and trace an outline onto the canvas that way instead. I can understand people working on huge over-sized pieces working with a projection, you'd spend a lot of time running backwards and forwards checking your scale and proportions otherwise. 

Below is an example of an outline that I would use to paint from. It's darker than I would usually draw it so that it would show up here. Just before I painted it I erased the pencil down to just a light marking, how I would usually have it marked out. The image above is of the finished bird.

As you can see it's just an outline of the bird's shape. A lot tidier than it would usually look because I darkened up the outline and you can't really see the other rough wobbly lines. I work on all the birds the same way regardless of colorings or markings on them. The details I just paint in as I go.

Something else I do is, when I'm working with watercolor paint I mix up all the colors I want to work with before I start to paint. When I'm working with acrylics I mix as I go.

So, how do you work when you're setting up a painting? Do you have any tips or shortcuts you would like to share here? I look forward to hearing from you.

Have a great week :)

The child and the messy room

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing" - Phyllis Diller

I don't know whether it's my daughter's age, she's seven, or just the way she naturally works, but my daughter's room always looks like a tornado passed through it. My son is now thirteen and I don't remember him being that messy at seven but who knows maybe my memory is going.

Anyway today we had the "you need to clean up your room or I'll go through it with a rubbish bag" talk. Miss seven whined a bit and said it was too hard to do on her own but I told her she was getting older now and that I trusted her judgement on what she wanted to keep and what should go out. So Miss seven went into her room and started to tidy up. I checked on her after five minutes and things did seem to be improving so I made the mistake of wandering off to do something else and promptly forgot all about the mess. After about an hour Miss seven proudly came through to tell me she had finished tidying and could she do something else now. Feeling very pleased with her maturity I followed her through to see what she had done.

Well, what can I say?

The room looked worse, if that's possible, than it had when she had started! Instead of going through all her artwork that was scattered all over the room and floor she had created new drawings and pulled out boxes of toys to hide them all behind and under. It was really hard not to laugh at her ingenuity.

Anyway she won and I helped her go through her artwork, storing the good pieces safely and binning the rest. We also went through the toys and sorted out some she had grown out of to donate. On the plus side we had lots of fun and even found three pairs of socks and some other clothes she thought she had lost.

This week I've been learning to draw human body parts. Realistic and cartoon hands and eyes. Hands are difficult and I need much more practice. I like the expressions you can get with just eyes though. Today's sketch is just eye expressions made with a black pen.