More Birds!

I guess I musst have birds on the mind, because most of my projects lately have featured them.  I'm taking an online class on Experimental Art (see button at the right).  It's a lot of fun, and the projects are intended to help us open up to be more creative and playful in our art.  Above is a project where we were to play with tracing images.  Since I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to draw birds in my backyard journal, I thought it would be fun to trace some birds just to get to know the basic shapes.  Then I transferred the images onto some old road maps, cut them out and collaged them.

This second piece started out with me just playing in my sketch book -- looking through books with pictures of birds and trying to draw them.  Then I added some collaged images from magazines, colored in and collaged the birds, and added some acrylic paint.  I think it would be fun to cut these out and use them in another piece, but for now I just want to enjoy this page.

Great Class

This week-end I was able to attend an exciting workshop on using images with our lettering to create interesting works of art.  Our instructor was Annie Cicale, and if you can take a workshop with her, do!  Yesterday we all worked on apples -- doing studies with various media and then choosing a quote to add to one of our drawings.  You can see from the above picture that we did a lot of drawings of those apples! My finished piece is just below all the apples.  You can see it on the right, displayed with the work of some of the other artists in the class.  Several of us chose the same quote to work on.  One of the best parts about workshops like this is seeing all the different approaches we all used -- we had a classful of creative and bold artists.

On the left is what I created the second day.  We each brought something to draw, and a quote about it.  This is a poem by Shel Silverstein.  I'm going to include a copy of this in my backyard journal.  I had the cutest little potted sunflower as my object, and it made me smile just to have it on my desk.

Another drawing assignment

Have you ever really studied a pine cone? We had to for our latest art class assignment. It seems that every pine cone in the realm of nature grows in a spiral shape. It can even be mathematically plotted, using the Fibonacci sequence. I'm not big on math, but I love the fact that something as random looking as a pine cone is that carefully created. And anyone who draws a pine cone has to know that, or they will draw the spines sticking out at all the wrong angles and it won't look at all like a pine cone!
More evidence of our amazing Creator!

Drawing Class -- Assignment One

I am taking a drawing course at the Morton Arboretum -- pencil drawing. Our first assignment was to do a line drawing of a pansy -- no hatching or shading allowed. This is what I brought. I do think, were it not for the lettering I added, that this pansy looks a little lame. But hey, I just started! Next week we have to sketch a pinecone! Keep posted to see what that one looks like!