Sunday, May 24, 2015

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.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

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!!