Round 2: Time for this Dry Spell to End...

...actually, I just haven't been posting.  I took another intermediate watercolor class with Joyce Anderson this past winter and am signed up for her Spring Class.  Also took a three day workshop with Deanne Lemley a few weeks ago and came away extremely challenged.  Now I just want to start focusing back on journaling so I'm getting ready to take another Jane Lafazio class through Joggles.com

Heading to Arizona next week for Spring Break and hope to find some fun (hopefully cactus) flowers to sketch and paint!!!!

Time for this Dry Spell to End!!!!!

Been dry for a month and a half...lost interest in the Laure Ferlita class...Thought I would get back into the swing of things over Winter Break but foot surgery and crutches kept me from hobbling out to my outdoor studio in the back of the yard.  I know...not an excuse...I've just been in a rut.  Time to get out this rut!

Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 2 Lesson 4: Combining Design Elements

This week's assignment..., "...let's slow down a bit and make sure we're really getting the concepts of Positive Space, Negative Space and Values as well as remembering to "design" our pages to incorporate titles and/or word art, borders, and backgrounds.

I tried this with a bowl of curry chicken...it's okay...I do question my values. Also not so sure about purple for the background color.  Should I have used green since it's the complement of red?

Original Photo

Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 2 Lesson 3: Value Study

This lesson was to focus on a value study.  Create a monotone picture first, then apply what I learned about value to the color picture.  I chose a scene of shored up long boats on the island of Koh Phi Phi in southern Thailand.  The original photo itself isn't that great, but it did lend itself to value study.  My one piece of self-criticism is I think I may have gone too dark on the leaves of the tree.

Original Photograph

Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 1 Lesson 2: Negative Space

Paint the negative space around an image using our signature color (mine is perylene red)...  I really wanted to do the Golden Buddha from the Golden Buddhist Temple in Bangkok but didn't like the idea of the Buddha being white with shades of red to give it shape, so I decided to paint a background that was a mixture of quinacridone gold, quin. deep gold, raw sienna, and Holbein antique gold (metallic).  For texture I placed a crumpled up piece of plastic wrap on this and let it dry.  I love the background!  The golden Buddha in my original photograph is covered in thousands of small squares of gold sheets that people buy and rub onto the Buddha when they visit the temple.  The picture below doesn't capture the metallic gold sheen of many of the sections.  It was a perfect background color for the Buddha.

Original Photo

Another online class...

I'm taking another on-line art class, "Artful Journaling:  Explorations" with Laure Ferlita.  We are to pick a theme and a signature color.  My theme is "Travel Memories" and my signature color is perylene red.  This color is suppose to be on each of our pages.  I chose travel memories because I have all these great photos from previous travels and would love to reminisce while creating art in a journal.

This week's challenge was to draw small and leave a lot of white space.  I was inspired to do this with a close-up photo of dragon statue I took in Thailand in 2004.  It's not a black and white photo, and I was thrilled to see a small patch of red on one of the eyes!  I decided to make this assignment my journal cover page.  My only critique is the lower half of the dragon face isn't as light as it is in the original picture, but I think it still works.

My Dragonfly page...

...while researching dragonflies in Washington State I discovered the dragonfly I was sketching was our state insect, the "Green Darner Dragonfly" and it's one of the largest and fastest-flying dragonflies. It had a gorgeous emerald green body!

Here's my final page...