Art Journal class with Karen Mathews.

I was going to blog about this class the very next day, but here I am FOUR weeks later!

Better late than never.

The lovely Karen Mathews came to teach her art journal class at my house, her art journal is beautiful ( if you ever get to meet her have a peek)  

We did two journal layouts, the first was a double page spread featuring a jar of hearts.

                                               This is when the table was somewhat organized.

                                                                      Thats Karen!

                                                                      Getting messier...

                                                                 I love this page!

                                               paint covered hands are not for everyone!

                                                And then we started on the lettering page:

 It turns out that those Inktense pencils that I've had for years are the best fun ever!

Everyone found the day to be really relaxing, it flew by and was a great way to either add to or get started on our art journals. Thinking of what to write after "Just be" was trickier than you would think!

It was such a good class that when everyone was gone and the kitchen was back to looking like a kitchen  I sat down and added another page.

Thank you Karen for coming all the way down to Kerry, and thank you to all the ladies who came.

Bicycles in May.

I was recently asked by a friend to paint a picture of a red bike - her mother who has moved into a nursing home was reminiscing about a bike she had as a child, so this painting was to go in her new room.

Now, as it happens I did an online course with Jenni Horne (whose work I love) and she paints a lot of bikes, so this is what I came up with. 

This is very much Jenni's style. I paint dollies, much more mixed media, so I am working on combining a bit of this and a bit of that to come up with something that is more"me", my recent dollies have more black outlines which is making an interesting difference.  I suppose that is the point of online courses - you take them to learn new techniques and then you combine them with what you already know and that is how we grow our art.
I love painting in this style - the Paintsomething e-course was brilliant, I'm sure she will run it again if you are interested. In the beginning I practiced and practiced and then life got busy and I stopped for a while,  when I was asked to do this I was delighted to get back to it and then Jenni announced Paintsomething #2...... the timing could not have been better!

So, I am looking forward to learning more and maybe one day I will learn to take straight photos!!