Sketchbook In Progress

Thanks for all your comments on the gel plate work. It is fun fun FUN, and I'll be doing more.  Meanwhile, I am totally blown away by the work that's happening in my Sketchbook Practice class!  Check this out:

This is an exercise in exploring line.

And this is about circles.

Who knew you could get such fabulous variety from fairly simple exercises.  I will be offering this class again in the fall, date to be determined, but will definitely incorporate some of the exercises in my Collage Journeys in Vermont workshop this summer.  Thanks for visiting!

Sketch-In and Sketchbook Practices

Since The Sketchbook Challenge began last January I've been thinking about how I use and don't use a sketchbook. What is a sketchbook? How do artists use them? How is it different from an "art journal"? These are questions I've pondered over the year without forcing any answers.

To express your thoughts on the topic, click here to take a brief survey.

At Ink About It over the weekend, Sue Bleiweiss and I conducted a Sketch-In. We did lots of drawing exercises:

Then worked with watercolor, experimenting with materials:


And working from still life:
On the second day we painted papers:

Using various brands and types of acrylic paint:
Look at us all having FUN!
Here I am demonstrating something brilliant, I'm sure:

And this is Sue Bleiweiss with Lori, one of the owners of Ink About It.
Then Sue gave us a great little tutorial on making a quick and easy hard-cover book. She brought book kits for everybody, and people used their painted papers for covers and end-papers. What a creative and productive weekend! Check out Sue's free projects to find this book tutorial and many others.

Backgrounds on Paper and Cloth

I decided to take a Mixed Media with Paper and Cloth online class with Jane LaFazio, one of our Sketchbook Challenge bloggers. She is a fabulous fiber artist, and artist extrordinaire, and offers online classes through Joggles, one of my favorite mixed media supply retailers. For our first lesson, we are making backgrounds on paper and cloth (these ones are on muslin), using gesso, maybe texturing it, and then acrylic paint. Here are just a few of mine:

I applied gesso, then created texture using a knitting needle, scribbling lines in it. Once that was very dry, I Played With Paint!! Transparent turquoises and blues, and opaque Baltic Green; then I stamped the little white dots.

This one is done the same way, using a different color palette. I LOVE this muslin thing!This one is similar, though I let the first Paint Playground dry before adding some of the transparent colors: quinacridone gold and nickel-azo yellow.
I have no idea where these will go. Jane demonstrated a stencil technique as well in the first lesson, but I may wait to use that later in the process. Thanks for visiting!