Art Journaling Class at the Community College of Beaver County

 I just finished teaching Art Journaling at the Community College of Beaver County.  My students and I explored a variety of techniques and materials, from collage to acrylic painting to colored pencils, watercolor pencils and homemade stamps.  

We began each morning with inspiration from other artist, then moved on to a writing prompt, and spent the remainder of class creating in our journals.

Many thanks to CCBC for hosting this class, and to my students for the energy and authenticity they brought to each session.

I hope you all continue to create and make discoveries in your journals!

If you're interested in joining me at CCBC for future art classes, you can find a class listing here: https://www.ccbc.edu/arts

Nature Journal Update: June is Busting Out All Over!

June has blossomed into lush greenness and colorful flowers!

 

I recently purchased a set of Derwent Inktense colored pencils, and I used them to try to capture the bold colors of the day lilies blooming off my front porch.  I love the rich colors these pencils lay down. You can also add water with a brush to get a more ink-like look.

These pages were done with my favorite old set of Prismacolor colored pencils.  They've hiked hundreds of miles with me.

How very calming I find sitting in nature and following the contours and details of a tree trunk.  The rest of the world drops away, and I am left with only my art, and my connection with the tree.  

I hope you find time this summer to sit in nature and connect!

Portrait Society of America Open Studio Session with David

Sunday afternoon, Lorrie Minnecozzi, the local ambassador for the Portrait Society of America, opened her home to artists for a figure drawing session.  David was our model for the session, dressed in Victorian garb.

The session began with a series of 2-minute gestures.

With our drawing hands warmed up, David took several 5-minute poses before starting the long seated pose.

After getting David's body and face laid in, I enjoyed the challenge of drawing in the fabric folds and buttons.  Lorrie loaned me a fantastic 9XXB pencil to try, and I was impressed with the range of values it was capable of making --really juicy dark darks to delicate, light lines.  I used it for my long drawing, and will look for one of my own in my next art materials purchase.

Osher Watercolor Explorations: A Blue Virginia Mountain

Friday marked the last session in my Osher Watercolor Explorations class, and we focused on painting landscapes with skies. 

I had fun preparing for class by painting clouds off my front porch the day before.

The painting was meant to be expressive of the clouds without being literal.  I laid in a flat wash of Ultramarine Blue, and quickly, while the painting was wet, lifted out cloud shapes with a paper towel.  I then mixed a blue gray by adding a bit of Burnt Sienna to the Ultramarine Blue, and watering it down quite a bit, and added that in to create shadows under the clouds and within them.  

For my class demonstration painting, I selected a photo I took on a recent trip to Virginia to visit with family.

I was taken by the clouds, the blue shadows, the hazy mountains receding in the distance and the way the blues transform into greens as they approach the foreground. 

I hope you get a chance to go outdoors to paint this summer.  If you're not able to, why not paint your own version from the photo above?

Find Your Joy Taster Course with Louise Fletcher

I've begun the Find Your Joy Taster Course -- a free online class offered by abstract landscape artist, Louise Fletcher.  The assignments are exciting to do, and they uncover so much within me -- what I like, what I don't like, how I feel about failure, why I paint.  

The instructions for the painting above were to take a 22" x 30" sheet of heavy paper, tape off the edges and tape off 6 "windows," and then paint as if the whole paper was your canvas.  For our palette, we were to choose one each red, yellow & blue plus black and white.  Then we were instructed to set a timer for 30 minutes and paint what felt good.  If it didn't feel viscerally good & make us happy, we were to stop and choose some other approach.  

Louise said to act like Kindergarten children and simply play with the paint.  Let go.

I gessoed up my sheet of illustration board, squirted out some paints, and let loose.

Holy cow!  The experience felt fully engaging, empowering & joyful.  I loved the sensation of swirling the brush thick with paint over the illustration board.  Bright color contrasts and quick scraping back with the brush handle felt natural and expressive. I fell in love with this form of painting.

I recommend that you check out Louise's YouTube page here and her website here.  Watching her YouTube videos has helped me shape my own art.  Maybe it will help you too.

Poetic Inspiration Accordion Fold Book

My dear friend recently shared the poetry of Rupi Kaur from her book Home Body.  I wanted to make an artful copy of those lines to tuck into a gift basket for my friend, so she could turn to them for inspiration and self care.

I got the idea of creating a book of quotes from artist Joanne Sharpe's blog "Whimspirations."

I began with a 3" x 20" piece of 140# cold pressed watercolor paper. I folded it in half, then folded each half in half again, etc., until I had an accordion book of blank pages.  

I painted each page with contrasting or analogous colors, creating designs and patterns on the fly.  I did this to both sides of the paper.

When the watercolor paint was dry, I wrote the poetry quotes over the painted designs with a white Uniball pen and a black Micron pen.  

I found that slowly writing these wise words over the colorful pages was calming, and wonderful self care for me in the moment. 

Why not make your own accordion fold book of your favorite quotes?  You can keep it to meditate on, or make one for someone you care about.  A gift of your artwork is a unique and special treat!

Upcycled Tea Bag Art Cards

Years ago, I discovered the thrill of turning used office paper, junk mail and dried flowers into handmade recycled paper.  A mere blender and a window screen gave me the power to turn trash into artful stationary.  It felt revolutionary.

The excitement of turning cast off items into art never left me, and recently, I discovered the idea of turning used tea bags into tiny artworks.  

The procedure is simple. As soon as your tea bags have served their job, been plucked from the hot water and cooled, you can carefully open them up and dump the tea leaves into a compost pile or flower bed. 

 Rinse the paper tea bag to remove any excess leaf bits.  Let them dry, and put them to use!

I have a collection of stamps I made from wine corks and old erasers.  The wobbly little stamp designs suited my teabags ideally.

I experimented with creating collage cards, and noticed that the tea bag paper is porous.  When I tried using liquid PVA glue on my stamped teabags, I had troubles with the ink running, and with the glue showing through the paper.  

Glue sticks worked better.  The stamped design didn't run, and the teabag paper was tough enough, in spite of its gossamer nature, to withstand the pressure of running a tac glue stick over it.

I like the transparency & earth-tones I find in teabag paper, and discovered that it works beautifully in layering and letting designs beneath it show through -- this time with liquid PVA glue (below).

Scraps I used for testing watercolor paint swatches became collage pieces that matched the tea color of my teabag papers.  Magic!

One of the most fun parts of creating with upcycled materials for me is the experimentation phase, when I discover what a material can do.  

My teabags came in two sizes -- 2 1/2" round bags, and 4" x 6" rectangles.  I found that the rectangular pieces made delightful stationary on their own.  I wrote a letter to my best friend -- an ideal paper for concentrated thoughts and focused ideas. I made sure to put a scrap piece of paper underneath the teabag paper as I wrote with a rollerball ink pen -- the porous paper let some of the ink through.

Why not brew up some iced tea, unfurl the teabags, and create your own miniature artworks this summer?  A lovely way to spend time in artful self-care.

Watercolor Explorations: Landscape

In preparation for our first landscape class, David and I took a hike with a camera and captured several landscape scenes.  I also got permission from a photographer friend to share several of his photos with my Osher class.  

I sketched a rough outline of the scene, marked out the highlights in the foliage around the old tree trunk, and used masking fluid to protect the highlights on the tree's trunk.  

To create the woodsy foliage, I began with washes of mostly Windsor Yellow, with a bit of Sap Green mixed in.  I wanted to capture the sense of sunlight pouring into the foliage. While the foliage washes were wet, I added Sap Green splotches and even a bit of cool, Hooker's Green.  Several layers of leafy greens came next. 

After the forest background was done, I worked on the main trunk and nearby trees & twigs.  I mixed Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna for a general gray, and Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber for darker areas.  I also washed in some Sap Green to the main tree trunk to represent the green I saw reflected there. I added a bit of earthy browns and grays to the forest floor.

The final step was to use a rigger brush for a few fine limbs and twigs, and a spattering of white gouache, Sap Green, and Windsor Yellow.

Watercolor Sketching on a Summer Day

 

One lovely summer morning, I found myself with some time to create. Sitting on my front porch, I was drawn to the lush treeline where it met the sky, and simply started "sketching" with my paints and brush.  I followed the forest canopy down the hill with my brush, and included the single-wide trailer down the hill, the place where we lived while we built our solar home.  Tucked in between the hills, the trees and the tall pasture grasses, it charmed me.W

With all the green-on-green, I felt like the scene needed a bit more contrast to come to life, so I used a Micron pen to add contour lines.

Sometimes, it's a pleasure to let the scene lead you in your painting, to experiment and make discoveries.  

Watercolor Explorations Vermeer Still Life

In Friday's Osher class, I asked my students to set up a still life of household items.  I collected items that drew my artist's eye -- the colors and forms of the apples and mango, the pot-bellied, shiny copper pitcher, and the intensely cobalt blue wine bottle all spoke to me.

As I started painting, I enjoyed making shadows by mixing Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, and creating my own black for the backdrop by mixing Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber.  I prefer the liveliness of shadow colors you mix yourself, and varying the amounts of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber in the drape made the wash more varied, just as you see in real life.

The copper pitcher color felt tricky to create, but came about randomly as I mixed Cadmium Yellow and Burnt Sienna to make the bruised marks in the mango.  David looked at my palette and pointed out that I could use the resulting mango color to start my copper pitcher.  It worked beautifully.  As I built up layers and added shadows, I used brush strokes to match the marks the hammer had made as it shaped the copper. 

Every painting teaches you something, and this painting taught me that the still life I set up -- though a beautiful composition with rich colors -- was too complex for the hour and a half of class time I had budgeted for it. I finished the painting later, thinking that a much simpler still life would have been more manageable and inspiring.

I've included a photo of my still life.  It reminded me of something Vermeer would paint.  

Feel free to paint it yourself!