gardens, frolicking, and drawings

Dandelions are everywhere.....They're especially magical at sunset.

The garden is a little slow to bloom - geraniums, bleeding hearts, clematis, and a few blue bells are just starting to peek out. 

As promised, here are my very first drawings from the draw happy course. I am still stoked with these online classes - the intended effect was to spark up my creative mojo, and I'm happy to see it seems to be working. I'm constantly working on 'something'. Yay :-)

Backgrounds - gazillions of them

I've spent a good part of the entire morning making background papers. These will be used in the coming weeks as part of the Behind the Art Class, and the Jane Davenport classes.

                                                             (this one is my favourite)

These two are created with thick gesso either just slapped on willy nilly, or slapped on and pressed into with stamps on mixed media paper. Once the gesso was dry, I rubbed on some watercolour crayons, and then brushed over them with a very wet brush.

These are again, mixed media paper with a few drops of soft body watercolour paint, then all smudged and spread with a very wet brush. I then used a paper towel to quickly dab and smudge to remove the brush marks, and create the marbled look.

These were made the exact same way as the watercolour ones above, but I used a soft body acrylic paint instead. It's impossible to see the difference in the photos above, but on 4 of the backgrounds I used golden paints, and the purple and orange were made with Liquitex basic paint. The golden paint is a far better quality paint (but expensive), and you can really tell the difference in the finish. The cheaper paints are flatter and more matte looking. The golden paints seem to have a lot more depth. I'm going to have to add more colours of golden to my wish lists - which is expanding exponentially by the minute. ;-)

Classes, recovery, and missing things

Along with the missing box from Michelle, I also can't find a bunch of various studio supplies. Alcohol inks - gone, credit card - gone (cancelled and replaced), vintaj patinas - gone, assorted craft books - gone. I'm sure a bunch of other items that I have completely forgotten ever existed are also gone. Not worrying too much about those at the moment though ;-)

So where on earth have they gone? My house is not all that big - pretty small actually. I've cleared the basement, the garage, and all of the bedrooms. I can only hope that one day while looking for something else, the wayward box will reappear - and I will finally create something with Michelle's gorgeous components.

I can either spend the next year completely tearing apart the house while getting angrier, and angrier with myself - or just move on. I'm moving on.

So in good news finally, I signed up for 6 fantabulous classes with Christy Tomlinson, and Jane Davenport.

I am so incredibly stoked. As some of you may know - I've been battling a pretty severe depression over the last few years. It's been a struggle with changing meds numerous times, meds that cause uncontrollable shaking, insomnia, etc, etc. Two steps forward, one step back. Slowly but surely i'm healing. A big step forward was not only getting my G1 (again), but actually finally completing the in class lessons! I'll be starting my in car lessons sometime this week.  The next step in healing is to start actually creating things with regularity. I've made it my personal mission to make something (anything) every day for the next year. A drawing, a pair of earrings, torch something - anything as long as I'm doing something creative. With that, I hope that my creative inspiration will return - forcing it along if I have to. Sitting around waiting for it to return isn't working out so well. ;-)

I've started two of the courses. The Draw Happy mini course, and the Behind the Art class. Both are perfect to start out with. The idea is to 1 - just start drawing, in this case faces. Lots and lots of faces. And 2 - to play around with your art supplies. How they work with each other, how they feel on different backgrounds. watercolour, paper collage, acrylic paint, markers, molding compounds. Anything and everything.  Here are my very first class assignments - nothing too close up, as they are not fabulous. I'm having so much fun though - i don't care. lol. I must have a secret love affair with pink. weird.