Make Art Where You Are

 

Taking classes is how I stay inspired these days.  My local public library gives us free access to CreativeBug, which has enough classes to keep me busy for awhile!  CreativeBug has not only instructional classes on all things creative, but also 70 Daily Practice Series.  Each of these offers 30 short videos and prompts designed to get you creating each day for a month.

Right now, I'm taking a series called Make Art Where You Are, with Courtenay Cerruti.  I'm really enjoying it, and this sketchpage of markers and pencil crayons is from Day 6 Using the White of the Page.  I'm interested in trying a bit of a mixed media drawing approach, and it was fun using markers and pencil crayons together.  I'm pleased with the results too.

I'm almost at the end of my Stillman & Birn Alpha Series landscape sketchbook which I started in 2019 for Whims in Watercolor 2:  "Loose and Fearless" with Joanne Sharpe.  I'm feeling the urge to finish and consolidate sketchbooks again.....

Sustainable Cocktails

 

Who knew there was such a thing?

Playing with Blind Contour Drawing

 

I'm missing my friend Janice who used to remind me when I didn't blog.  She has been under the weather lately.

My journals have been proliferating again and I was thinking today about possibly indexing them.  Then I realized that my blog has always functioned as a kind of index for me; if so, I better not neglect it!

This is in my Talens art creation studio journal. 

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.