On My Walk

 

These are a series of pages from Kate Sutton's Illustrated Life Journal class.  I love the square format of my journal and these little vignettes are a great way to quickly capture things I see on my walk. 

I'm finding out what I like and don't like about markers.   I like drawing things like the digger with a marker.  I like them less for large expanses of colour.

Once again, I had fun drawing the school, but not the sky.

I enjoy the limited colour palette Kate teaches and how it unifies the page.  Colour mixing is more difficult with markers than with paint. 

Sketching from Reference Material

 

This is another lesson from Kate Sutton's Domestica course.  Drawing with markers is fun and they dry instantly!

Today I'm Grateful For:

 

This is one of the daily pages Kate teaches in the new course I took recently.  Simple and fun, it helps us to think about what we are grateful for - always a good idea.  Gratitude boosts the spirit!

The colour scheme is so simple you don't need a lot of markers for this one!  She even suggests a highlighter will do. LOL

New Course, New Journal!

 

I took a course recently on Domestica called "Illustrated Life Journal:  A Daily Mindful Practice", taught by Kate Sutton.  The course attracted me for the following reasons:

• I love the idea of an illustrated life journal
• Mindfulness has been on my mind a lot lately (I'm really bad at it LOL)
• I have a lot of markers I rarely use and wanted some instruction and a structured way of using them for a longer project.  I could then decide whether I liked using them and how I might incorporate these as a change from watercolours 

Kate uses a square journal for the course and so I broke the seal on a 9 x 9 inch Leuchterm1917 journal I bought myself in November for my birthday.  I love the paper in these books - smooth and thick.

I'm going to do a series of blog posts about the course and my learnings. 

Spring Floral Flourishes

 

Last night the Westcoast Calligraphy Society put on a marvelous Zoom program taught by Heather Held in Toronto.

Our project piece was an Easter egg but I was also thrilled with my practice sheet (below).  Too bad you can't see the shiny Stickles!

I had such fun, and I'm with Heather when she told us how she found this much easier than lettering.  After a false start with a falcon nib I found a Hunt 56 in my box, which further research today tells me is closer to the Hunt 22 that she was using.  Sometimes I come out of these evenings glad that I tried, but feeling ham-fisted and wondering if calligraphy is for me at all.  It is a rare treat to do so well the first time.  (By no means are these perfect, but for a first time attempt, they aren't too bad.)

I was reminded of a similar session presented by Wendy Cowley in 2014 (pointed pen mandalas) and how pleased I was with my results from that evening as well.  

Engaging or Relaxing?

 

Sleep Therapy continues to inform my art, as I look for things to do at midnight that are relaxing rather than engaging.  I've played with coloring books (relaxing), drawing (engaging), and slopping watercolor paint around (the jury is still out on this one).

After a boring but relaxing session with a colouring page, I thought about creating my own colouring book filled with trucks.  So, I drew these trucks to paint later. 

All of these trucks were inspired by the wonderful photographs by @mozarts_ride on Instagram.

Midnight Madness

 

I'm still playing around in my journal at midnight.  Last night my toys included a parallel pen, gel pens and watercolours.