paint party Friday... the past two weeks

 

Ahhhhh paint party Friday is here! A time when creatives share what they've been making all week

this was from last week's workshop with Elizabeth Foley, did I show you? The workshop was a mix of art and finding your mojo to create. I like to write, to put words together so I combined those two loves in this piece. 

Both the Foley workshop and the Kelly Blaser workshop included some meditation before each session. I have "monkey brain" jumping from thought to thought so it was a learning experience to take so much time to just quiet down. 

 I painted this face in 5 minutes too, on a 3" scrap of paper

Some things I learned over the course of two weeks...

sometimes it's okay to spend just 5 minutes to paint/draw/sew/ make something from your heart

I like combining words and drawings in my sketchbook. 

Even in the writing workshop that also taught some Buddhist principles and helped us to explore what we need to live a full life,  I found myself adding paintings to margins as I thought.

I sew art quilts, I bead, I play music, I write, I paint and draw

I am not one thing, I am like most people, complex

as Michaelangelo said, I am always learning

 

 

 

even if only coloring in my calendar (basford) I learn about shading and paint mixing

so when I became aware of Rachel at workshop muse giving a 4 part art principle/meditation free workshop, I took it. The first one was a discussion of just color. She said make blobs on your paper in cool colors, just seeing the color on paper...
 

this is what I made

this is what she showed us after we painted

OH! I guess this is why we don't see what she means first as it might limit us!

I thought blue is cool so I smeared blue on in an arc. I love seeing watercolor move across paper! Then thought gray is cool, and added some gray under it. I love color so I added green, daubing the brush up and down to put color over the blue, and it mixed, and blurred and blended as it was all wet. 

Again she never said let it touch in fact it was much later when she said now try it touching.

dh came out of his office and said, it's the adirondacks! We used to go every year at this time.
 

I mixed up this palette, aware of how much water I put in so that the colors would be more transparent. I've been playing with transparency lately and how subtle colors are beautiful too. I started with the orange ochre color across the paper (torn sheet of 140 lb canson paper) and then just added in cool color, warm color, cool, then warm and I like it  lot. 

when I saw her non touching strips of color I went to a new sheet and painted these lovelies in the same color palette.  I wanted to see how they overlapped, how they were diluted vs more pigment, how adding a line of darker or contrasting color blended. At the end, when I should have backed away from a pretty painting, I added silver gel pen (signo) for stem accent, and she asked us to add words. 

At the end of the session I had a tryptich.  I had used the same palette of color so they all look good together and remind me of the mountains back east, the fresh pine scent and green trees, yellow birch, blue skies. 

She went over the concept of line... asking us to ignore color, shape, space and focus on what lines we could see...

I never have white page syndrome. I LOVE a clean fresh sketchbook page! Finding this more difficult than I suspected, I tried to paint the lines I saw ahead of me, with a paintbrush only. 

family room

more lines...

another person might have used only black pen, or chosen a different style, so I put my take on practice for a word I'm going to put on the next paintings, with tombow brush markers in color of course.

When she did the video on shape

we started with a meditation that included deep breathing. She asked us to visualize the shape the air took inside our body, and once again I imagine every person viewing had a different vision. Mine was sort of round, sort of oval with indistinct edges... so I began in the sketchbook with dilute pigment and my watercolor brush. 

I keep the sketchbook and watercolor set by the computer, so there is little prep when I take time to paint for learning

I just painted which felt nice. I added new circles, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repeating colors. I noted the movement on thin drawing paper vs thick watercolor paper, I did not like the harsh line of tombow here, but quite liked doing pale circles then saturated color on top. I liked seeing the overlap even on thin paper where it dries instantly. Then I wanted to try it on torn 140 lb paper, bent to become cards for friends... 

This one is very satisfying to me... I like the placement... is it seaglass? I like the bleeding lines from color to color since I tilted it as it dried, I like the blending. 

then I went on to do this... didn't like it as much and had a hard time knowing why. Maybe too many circles? Too dark? so I added in posca pen in white for highlights and dragged a tombow marker along the sides to accent the bruised paper tear. I think with "breathe" across the painting it will be a fine card. 

Every art project, learning or just creations, take so many decisions. Some spontaneous like how to mix the color or what kind of bleeding you want. Some more thoughtful like which word to use or the font or placement of it. 

Art is my passion, whether I'm using fabric or paint, have a lot of time or a little, whether it is shared here or stored away with a date on it for my eyes only. 

I have been working on a project in studio, translating one of my paintings into fabric art, more on that tomorrow. Until then, happy creations!

Linking to:
https://paintpartyfriday.blogspot.com/