Wings and Stars in Aqua Tones

Another very mixed media piece in my journal. My new art friend Rachelle reminded me recently of how much I used to love aqua colours. This piece flowed from that memory; thanks Rachelle!

The tag reads: "This page is dedicated to Rachelle & Sandra & Patti... my Art Friends."
Rachelle provided the inspiration, and Sandra and Patti's generosity is in there too.

Happy Weekend, all!

Finally Something New

I do have more new stuff in my latest art journal, but haven't been sufficiently motivated to photograph it. Sadly my scanner and the art journal spreads don't work too well together! That's what I get for using both pages and not studying up on my photography. This piece is so mixed media... I started with a watercolour wash for the background, used some "Radiant Rain" to see what would happen (not much, really. you can sorta see it in the tree trunks but it's reeeeeally subtle), added some fun papers in there and used one of the textured ones dipped in sepia ink to make the kinda-burned looking patch. The critters were drawn on pages from a Taiwanese textbook I found at Value Village. Outlines with sepia ink and dipping pen and extra colour from my Prismacolor pencils.

The Wandering Cloud Finds a Home

The cloud just didn't seem to fit the other page, but it has found a permanent spot overtop of those strange treetop monkeys. Good thing I'd only scotch-taped it in the first spot.

I had an invasion of family over the weekend, including my "little" brother staying with us for a couple of days. Luckily he's as artsy as us and while I didn't get any alone/down time, I did do some arting, as evidenced here.

What you can't see is that the monkey page is inside of my FINALLY stitched together new book. Also a couple of sketches from my too-big-to-fit-in-the-scanner sketchbook which will hopefully be worked up into something more than doodles, AND Opus had some of their 8.5x11 hardcover watercolour books on sale for $4.50, so I picked up one for myself and had to christen it.

Not the ideal weekend I'd planned, but it could have been worse.

From Patti's Place and in the Geography Book

None of these are finished, per se, but I thought I'd share this stage, at least.
The one with the copper cloud I started over at Pattio's, and the other two are a spread from the geography book.

It's not messy, it's creative!

I did this to my desk last night and suddenly feel quite a bit better. Funny how that works!
I really love working in that old geography textbook.

Past and Progress

I've been feeling blue-ish lately which isn't conducive to much in the way of art. Thank whatever little gods are listening that I have arty people in my life now who can inspire me to keep scribbling even when my heart isn't really in it. Previously when I've been down I would just... not do any art at all. This of course usually makes my blue funk even worse. Vicious cycle! In fact, there was a space of almost ten years when I produced a grand total of five drawings. Any progress I was making towards becoming a better artist came to a screeching halt.
Today whilst cleaning out the computer cave, I unearthed a backup cd of old images that I had thought were lost for good after my last catastrophic hard drive crash. They date from 1999 to 2003-ish and it was a good reminder of the progress I have made in the past ten years.
This one here was the most time-intensive thing I'd ever done. You see, I coloured it in Photoshop... with a MOUSE. This was before my wonderful tablet was gifted to me, so sometime in 2000, I'd guess. Obviously I did pretty much everything to it that you're NOT supposed to do, and the pencil sketch worked far better. There's so much Blur tool on this thing it makes me question my glasses prescription.
My first few tries with the tablet were tentative to say the least. It isn't like the latest model that my art-friend Barb has, where you look at the tablet to draw... you draw on the tablet, but watch what you're drawing on the monitor. That took some getting used to! Plus, I've never found Photoshop to be very intuitive... it's an awesome and powerful graphics program, but Painter really set me free to experiment with my tablet.
So the piece I ended up calling "Frogmask" was a mix of using the mouse and the tablet which gives it a rather odd look, I think. I seriously can't stand looking at the tree, grass or background on this for very long because the things I screwed up on are so very apparent to me, however, I still love the idea of it. Oh, and the shoes. The shoes are pretty nifty.

After a while I grew so used to the tablet that it was pretty much all I used. I would scan in the pencil sketches but those rarely made it to my gallery; everything was digitally painted. In retrospect, this was a good way for me to loosen up and play with paints which had always intimidated me in school because there were so many RULES. The tablet and Painter let me play without fear of ruining an expensive piece of canvas or paper or "wasting" paint. I could experiment without guilt!
This is one of the few pieces I have done that I never ended up hating for its mistakes. It cheered me up during a bleak time, and somehow can still do that for me now when I need it.
There wasn't any sketch for this one, it was started and finished in Painter using all sorts of the tools that I have since forgotten.
I'll leave you with Cosmic Cow.

Cat-like-thing in tree-like-thing

This creature was inspired by a doodle from the sketching I did at the Vic Poetry Slam, oddly enough.
The media is so mixed that I can't quite recall all the steps I took with it. The original background that you can see peeping through the aurora strip was, if I remember correctly, a watercolour and chalk wash with chalk overtop and was done months ago. It sat in my book waiting for inspiration to strike. After the poetry slam, I knew I needed to draw the little creature, so I did and that sat for a couple of weeks. The bluey-purple nightsky and leaves are acrylic and I did that at Patti's place last weekend. The rest I did last night with my fave white pens and Prismacolor pencils. The photo sucks, unfortunately, but I can give the gist of it at least.