Winner of Blick Studio Acrylics GIveaway Is....

 Sara Evans!  Congratulations.  I chose this entry at random from the pieces that met the criteria, NOT because the others are not as good.  All of the entries were quite beautiful and interesting. 

I got lots of great submissions for this project, and I am posting a representative sample.  Some readers seemed to have the impression that the instructions included actually cutting up the piece, but they don't.  You just make a piece in which the four quadrants are enough different from each other so that IF you cut it in four, the pieces would not look like they all came from the same piece.  It is a lot harder than it looks because our natural (or cultivated) tendency is to unify, to make things balanced and matchy matchy.  Variety, diversity, elements that contrast, combinations that produce tension or dissonance, THAT is hard.  But in doing so, we have an opportunity to observe the inner friction, and also to expand our mark-making vocabulary.  Here are a few samples of the entries:

Sara Evans, our WINNER!

Barbara Bytwerk

Jacqueline Quinn

Debbie, who blogged about this project here.

And now for a video of me doing this project:

Here are the two pieces that resulted:

This is the main one in the video; you can see I painted over that section on the left that was giving me trouble.  Lot of editing there.

This is the piece that I started at the end of the video.  I was more relaxed with this one.

THANK YOU to all who participated!  If you have any suggestions for other projects I might offer in this way (take submissions, offer a giveaway), please make suggestions.

A Challenge for your Inner Critic - and a giveaway

I do this exercise as a warm-up in some of my longer workshops, and also in Art Therapy For Your Inner Critic.  It is fun, more challenging than you would think, and it engages your Inner Critic in a way that is actually helpful rather than discouraging. I use this approach in my Art of the Postcard class too, but it's a little different.

Here is how it goes:

Create a piece (or better yet, a series of pieces) in which each quadrant is distinctly different from the others.  Do not simply divide the substrate into four equal parts and make separate compositions.  It has to be one composition, but if you were to divide it in four, the pieces would NOT look like they were cut from the same piece.   Use paint, collage, drawing, stamping, or any other technique.

You can see two examples in the second half of this post.  And here are a few more:

Acrylic paint, watercolor crayon, graphite, collage on 10"x11" printmaking paper

Acrylic paint, Pitt pen, watercolor crayon, graphite on 10"x11" printmaking paper

Acrylic paint, graphite, watercolor crayon, collage on 10"x11" printmaking paper.  For links to my materials see "My Favorite Materials" in the right margin of this blog.

E-mail me your examples (scan or photograph, send jpgs) and I will post a selection.  Tell me what challenges you faced, if you made any discoveries, or if it was simply fun and easy.  I will choose a winner, who will receive a set of Blick Studio Acrylics.  These are good student-quality paints, much much better than craft paints, and much less expensive than professional quality paints. 

Have fun, and good luck!  I will post a winner on Friday, August 22, so don't hesitate.  Take out your art materials and get to work.