Bits and Pieces

Spring is a hard animal to tame.  After being cooped up all winter, every time the sun is out and there's warm weather, I want to to outside and soak it all in.  Instead of cleaning the house, I will probably head over to the Arboretum in the next half hour.  But in the meantime, I went outside this morning and took some pics of my neighbor's tulips.

The above one is a normal photo, which I like.  I decided to play with the bottom one in Photoshop, and came up with this painterly look, which I also really like.  

 I am also taking a couple of online classes.  One by Alisa Burke is called "Sketch into Spring".  Here's a practice page with a technique where you paint wet-on-wet with watercolor in the basic shapes of spring flowers.  Later you add some expressive lines to make the flowers stand out more.  On this one, I haven't added any lines.  The one below I did yesterday and already added the lines.  Some of the flowers I like, some I don't.  It's going to take some practice to create organic looking lines.

 And I'm also taking another class.  This isn't necessarily an art class, but it incorporates art journaling.  It's with Brene Brown, called The Gifts of Imperfection.  This week, we were supposed to identify our "Superpower" and the "Kryptonite" that keeps us from exercising our superpower.  At first I was a little confused about what she was looking for with the term "Superpower".  But I think I figured out that it's an inner gift that I have and incorporate into any meaningful work that I do.  I chose Enthusiastic Vision.  Once I get a vision in my head for a new project, I tend to jump in with both feet, and try to pull everyone in with me.  (And without realizing it, I demonstrated this by spending ALL DAY working on this cut paper image that I wanted to use on this page.)

 Given my superpower, I have illustrated my Kryptonite below.  Depending on the scope of the project, who is around to get involved with me, and my current energy level, I can easily become frustrated, disillusioned and burnt out.  Fortunately, I didn't experience any of those in doing these pages, and I'm quite pleased with the way they turned out.

 That's a bit of what has been going on with me with week.  And if you'll excuse me, I have a house to clean date at the Arboretum.

Library demo

Today the Chicago Calligraphy Collective participated in an event at the Palatine Public Library.  One of our members taught a class in Italic Calligraphy, while others of us hosted demos or made bookmarks.  We had lots of enthusiastic participants.  Here's some pictures from the event.
My friend Pat helped participants create "Flexagons", which are complex creations where you can hide secret messages.

Our bookmark calligraphers worked hard all day.

And I had a steady stream of kids and adults eager to learn the secret of making tiny watercolor blossoms.

Here's what some of my samples looked like.  (Sideways picture again  . . .  sigh)

Everyone had a great time and learned a lot as well!

Watercolor Class Wrap-Up

This morning we had our "Experimental Watermedia Techniques" wrap-up class at the Arboretum.  We all brought the pieces we've been working on since we created backgrounds a couple of weeks ago in class.  Above is my whimsical piece.  The technique was dipping cheesecloth in watercolors and then placing it on the paper to dry and create a textured background.  But as mine was drying, I kept thinking of a fishnet.  So I glued the cheesecloth to the paper, drew some little fish, and this is the result.

Below are a couple of backgrounds that I decided to try to calligraphy on.  With the rough (coldpress) watercolor paper, I'm not really pleased about my letterforms.  But I like the quotes.

And finally, this was the hardest piece to work on.  We put fresh leaves down on wet presentation board (I think that's what it's called), and then generously dabbed watercolors all over.  We put plastic wrap over the whole thing, smooshed it around a bit for effect, and let it dry.  After peeling off the plastic wrap and leaves and letting the paint dry thoroughly, it was up to us to decide how to finish.  I decided to use opaque white paint to highlight the areas around the three main leaves.  I don't think it's done yet, but this is as far as I got with it so far.

There were lots of other very creative pieces by my classmates as well.  What a fun class!

Watercolor class piece 1

We have two weeks to create some pieces from the backgrounds we made at our Watercolor class last week-end.  I started this tiny piece by wetting the paper (140 lb cold press watercolor), setting three small shells on top, adding some sand-colored watercolor, and sprinkling it with table salt, to try to get a sandy effect.  When it was dry, I spritzed the blue on with a toothbrush.  There were white blobs where the shells had been, so I added to shell texture with colored pencils, then added the text around the edges.  I had to really squeeze to get it all to fit!

Catching up

Oh my -- it feels like I've been out of the blog loop forever!  First there was our mini-vacation to Galena, Illinois.  Three days of relaxation, shopping, and doing as little as possible.  Here's a couple of pics from our time.  First, a vineyard where we did some wine tasting.  It overlooked a lovely valley:

This is one of the B&B's we stayed at.  We had a private hot tub -- in the cupula on the top of the house.  Really fun!

This was one wall of the dining room of another of the B&B's.  Most of the clocks kept the correct time!

Following our trip, we hosted several family members who took Amtrak all the way from Sacramento, CA to Chicago.  The kids had never been to Chicago before, and they really had a great time.  They visited Millenium Park and the "Bean":

And the Museum of Science and Industry has a lot of great interactive exhibits.  This is a screen with computer-generated butterflies that will land on you if you hold still:

And then I was at a class playing with watercolors for the past two days.  Here's an unfinished piece that I think I'm going to like.  I didn't get a picture of it with the leaves off, but we peeled them off, and the next step is to manipulate the paint so you get a nice composition.  Mine has really nice colors, but doesn't look like anything yet.  I'll post pics when I get it finished (we have another class in two weeks where we do "show and tell") and I'll tell more about the process.