Abstract Adventure: Assignment 1

Hiya,
So my next quest in the 21 Secrets playground is the Abstract Adventure with Connie Hozvicka. It's been pretty interesting. My first asignment was to paint using the FEARLESS(TM) technique. It was pretty cool. So while the course focuses on abstract painting, it is mostly about being in the moment and being absorbed in what you're doing.
So, this the set up in my new studio at the new house:


The studio and the bedroom and pretty much all I've managed to sort out.
What I quite like about this workshop is that it focuses on painting BIG. Whenever I paint, it's usually tiny little things with a discrete plan and I spend most of my time hunched over my precious little treasure. In this workshop we use cheapy-cheap paint and just give'er on the biggest page we can find. It's great! You stand up at an easel or a wall and really get into what you're doing. It really gives me an opportunity to put my body behind the brushstrokes.

So, this is what I came up with after my first attempt at the first assignment which was to focus on getting colour down:

I'm not terribly pleased with it for a couple of reasons. 1) I don't mind how it looks, I'm just not thrilled. I'm really not a fan of muddy colours. I prefer my pigments to mix/blend well and vibrantly. There were a couple of spots where I mixed complementary colours or even black accidentally and the result was not pleasing 2) I really wasn't really doing the assignment. I didn't set an intention before I started, I wasn't really going with my gut, my mind was not focused AT ALL and I think it's reflected in outcome. Needless to say, I gave it another go.

Here's my Round Two:



I really like how it turned out. My intention was "Cathartic Peace". I'd been under a lot of stress lately and the intention was appropriate.

Here's another shot. I quite like it, I feel it gets across what I was aiming for a bit better than a view straight on.


Later I will get around to Assignment 2, which focuses on the use of Line.

Draw Happy: Beautiful

Last post for the night/morning. This is the third exercise from Draw Happy and starts off with a charge to gesso your art journal pages and use it as part of the design.

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Reply by Ashley E M Miller 1 second ago

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And this is what happened when I primed my paper with gesso.

The paper was primed with gesso mixed with Reeves Guache (in Blue Lake). I spattered it with a bit of Emerald Green and some dollops of Sap green spritzed with water.

This is the finished product:

The beast was created using black felt tip pen and painted with Violet Ink (Windsor Newton). A similar technique was used to create the rocks in the background. The water's texture and depth was created using oil pastels in various shades of blue (blended with lots and lots of rubbing) and the jelly fish were made around the green paint blobs, using a black art pen (that bled lots), Canary Yellow ink and a white Oil Pastel pencil crayon (which I've fallen in love with). The white was also used to make the bubbles and the 'wakes' of the tail.

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Draw Happy: Getting in the Draw Happy Mood

For this exercise Jane instructed us to think of what made us happy before we even picked up a pen. I thought about it for a bit and while listening to the Juno soundtrack, this is what I came up with.

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Reply by Ashley E M Miller 1 second ago

This first image is after thinking about what made me happy.

Apparently at that moment it was my beau's eyes, the apology orchid and some waves.

Go figure. What I did like a lot is the wonder and glory of gesso to cover a failed sketch attempt.

The drawings were done with pen and oil pastel. I really like how the waves turned out.

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Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 3

PANSY!!!!

That's what we worked on during the final class. This class focused on blending like with the narcissus, but also on glazing. I obviously didn't finish because I felt compelled to create massive flowers, the likes of which will only rival O'Keefe's. The thing with flowers though it that you need quite a lot of pinks. You could mix them yourself, but it's difficult to get just the right shade from bending over a hot palatte blending away. The color I used for the central purple pansey was called Rose Violet. I borrowed/acquired it from my neighbor. I tried to mix a color like it usin rose madder, but it really just didn't work.



This is just a close-up of a section that I quite like. I think the petals of the yellow flower blended quite nicely. I was impressed. The reason why it's so pale in spots is because that particulate flower was nearly white from reflecting the sun.

I also liked the precision and delicate nature of the fine veins we created using a skewer. I decided that I would like to get a stylus in order to recreate this effect consistently. The problem with the skewer was that it did get dull after a while.

Later I'll take a stab at finishing this up.

Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 2

Blooming....
ugh.

If you can get this technique right, you can created lovely organic edges to things. But more than likely, mastery of the technique will elude you and you will do what I did and just scribble in the mess with your brush.
I did manage some success on my second attempt and created quite a passable Narcissus flower. (The blooming effect was used to create the 'ruffled' edge of the flowers center)

Other than blooming, the other technique that we learned here was blending using wet-on-wet brushwork and also developing an eye for color. For all intents and purposed, narcissus flowers have quite petals, but if I just left the petals white, the painting would have looked more incomplete (i'm still not done with it lol). What I really got help with was developing a sense of value and shading. In the photo I was working from, there were hints of pink through the petals, violet in their shadows and yellow closer to the center.

Of course I took to long and ended up rushing at the end. The background was done with mostly pyrelen green and a veridian i mixed up in class.

Draw Happy: Drawing Tools

This is my posting for Exercise #2 that deals with different drawing tools. It was quite insightful, and learned lots.

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Reply by Ashley E M Miller 18 minutes ago

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This was my drawing tool test page. I had a stripe of Windsor Newton Canary Yellow ink, Crimson Acrylic, White Gesso, Black Gesso, Blue guash in ultramarine, and a strip of clear gesso.

I was impressed by how matte the clear gesso was, making it quite easy to draw on. The black gesso was neat, but obviously has a limited number of colors that can be drawn on top.

The acrylic was incredibly difficult to draw on, it was way too shiny. The Guash was much easier to work with as it was surprisingly matte. If I were to use this acrylic again, I would have to put a layer of clear gesso on top.

I love working in pen (I tend to use the felt-tip kind), but the surfaces they can be used in are limited. Perhaps a brush pen would be easier.

Overall, I was impressed with the ways that gesso can be used on paper. I had never really thought to use it like that as the paper is already "primed"

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Draw Happy: Doodles

So, I've been taking part in 21 Secrets Art Journaling Playground. It's been great so far. I've done one class: Drawing Happy by Janet Davenport. Here are my posts for the first assignment:

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Reply by Ashley E M Miller 1 hour ago

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Hi,

Thanks for the lovely workshop. It really helped get the creative juices flowing.

Here's some stuff in response to the request for doodles. I found a nice page from my lab book that I doodled all over while I was waiting for something. I decided that/have always known that, my thing is eyes. I draw them everywhere. Ever since I learned to draw them in art class at around grade eleven, they've always been something I can sketch on the fly. So, the first picture is the magnificence of waiting for science to happen. The second image is my doodle/warm up sketch for the workshop.

Permalink Reply by Ashley E M Miller 36 minutes ago

le sigh,
internets is being Crappy McCrapper Crap.

Here are my doodles...again.

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Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 1

Oh watercolor, how I love thee.
I took another watercolor class at Wyndham Art Supplies (with Karen Kesteloot). This time it was a three day workshop on creating flowers in watercolor using some more creative and watercolor specific techniques such as 'blooming', salt and masking.

The first day we just spent some time mucking about with the paint and learning to create specific effects.

In this first panel, we created a light wash of pale violet and waited for it to dry completely. NExt we overlayed it with a wash of green and then when it was quite wet, we dropped rock salt onto it. This isn't your table salt, it's basically the stuff they spray on the road in winter. To get it to work, you have to actually wet it, it's so big. We were emulating asters with this technique.

For this second panel, we we trying to create something daisy-like. Salt was used again, but this time the focus was placed on the center of the flower. An oval wash of yellow was overlaid with a wash of orange (made with quinacridone and rose madder) and was then salted so that the yellow came out as little dots in a foreground of orange. I was a bit heavy handed with the salt, so the effect was lost on mine. The petals was done in rose madder.
I really like how this one turned out. It was our first experiment with Masking Fluid. We basically made some little flowers with the stuff, washed over it with a nice green and then after removing the masking, painted in the bright colors of of the flowers. While the green was wet, we bruised to make stems and leaves. The way the stray stems and grasses burst out from the test patch make it seem kinda lively and...spring-ish.
And finally, Queen Anne's Lace. This was done by simply salting a green wash and making bruises where the stems should be. I really like how mine turned out. ^^


Day 2 and 3 are coming soon :)

Happy Summer

The weather's been lovely lately. As long as I'm well ventilated and not running around in a rush, I'm really enjoying it. Also, I can actually get a bit of sun (tasty tasty vitamin D). This is probably the closest I get to nature, letting my skin feel the breeze and the sunshine. It's one of those times of the year where I actually want to be outside and get all in-tuned with nature. Fall and Spring are ok, but Winter is crap and I have no desire to be outside most of the time. Even in Fall and Spring, you're covered up. I rarely find those times of year particularly inspirational, other than inspiring me to bitch.

Below are some things that were inspired by summery-ness. The two painting are from a 'Painting Nature' class that I took last summer at the Arboretum. At the end I tossed in a poem I made sometime last year.

Native Ontario Columbine

Fooling around with grasses

I quite like this poem, it sort of yo-yo's between grandiose and minute.

Magnetic Power

Artsy

Once upon a time, I bought some magnetic poetry because I thought it would be a nice addition to our fridge. Then because I'm greedy, I bought some more. Needless to say, our fridge is COVERED in words. The mood hasn't struck me to make poems lately, but I did like the things I came up with.

And this is the Fartsy.

I think I picked up the Art Kit and then the Nature Kit and as of now, I've got 18 poems.
I really like making this kind of poetry. Part of it is a scavenger hunt for the word I'm looking for and the other part is just letting the universe speak to me. Other things I quite like about this kind of poetry is that:



1) you have you be a bit spare with your words, there are only so many the's and a's. Also, why waste the space with fillers?



2) you can really create some unique/effective imagery. The above is a much more poetic way of saying, "I'm hungover as hell and I need some water..."


3) You can be completely non-sensical and that's acceptable because you do not have your entire vocabulary at your disposal, only a small subset.

I should really get back into this. I forgot how fun they were.

Expressive Figure Drawing.

Earlier this year I took an expressive figure drawing course at Wyndham Art Supplies (March 28th - April 18th). The focus was on getting moods and the media was gesso and ink. It was quite neat, we started out with a clear acrylic sheet and then painted the outline and 'mass' of the model. When we were ready, we painted in the shading onto the gesso. As usual, I was a bit slow getting started because my proportions were a bit off. Nonetheless it was quite fun. Below are some of my better ones.

*Disclaimer, there's gonna be nudity.*

This was from the first session. The mood here was something like surrender. This was my favorite from that day. For this, we used strong coffee to make a sepia shade.

The next session, we focused on vulnerability, in a child-like sort of way. One of the problems I faced was that if I started with the ink too early, it got mixed in with the gesso, which wasn't inherently bad, but it made it difficult to get a really intense color. Here I used a mix of sepia and black ink.

The next three paintings are from the final day. The emotion we were trying to capture was something like triumph and feeling powerful. I really liked this day, I think it was a combination of actually sitting in a good spot, so I don't get poses with massive for-shortening and also having loosened up and gotten the hang of it. I think the model was also quite good at capturing the mood in the poses.

Now, for these last two I decided to experiment with (mua-na-na) black gesso. I had some lying around from another project and thought I'd take a crack at starting with the shadows and pulling the highlights out with white acrylic paint. I quite like the effect.

Fortunately, we didn't need to worry about faces, because otherwise I would have never finished :S.

There was a third model between child-like and triumph. It was a man. I didn't post any of those paintings because I didn't like how they turned out. I always seem to have trouble drawing men. I'm not sure why. Something to do with the proportions and something to do with landmarks on the torso perhaps. It's something I would like to work on.

Nevertheless, I will end with triumph!!

Animal encounters

I saw a bunny this morning. (Snapshots count as art...so I decided to add it to the blog. I had to crop the photo too, so that makes it so much more than pointing and shooting, right?)

Anyway, (lol) I was walking from Uni and I saw this baby rabbit happily munching on the foliage. I tried to get my phone out as quickly and smoothly as possible. The photo was taken just as it was about to run off because a particularly noisy (and obnoxious) car came by and the rabbit decided it was time to hop off.

Earlier that morning I saw a Blue jay. That was fabulous because, I'd never seen one up close before. I've always seen cardinals, which I thought were pretty neat, but never a blue jay. The significance being that they are the only two birds I'm aware of in my city that are completely one color. Not just a splash of red, touches of yellow, or a green cowl, the whole bird is this brilliant, vibrant color.

I thought those two sightings were the coolest things ever, and given the crappy quality of the rest of my day, they were decidedly the highlight of it. I think it's really weird how excited most of us get about seeing wildlife. We're so far removed from nature in our little worlds, that any animal encounter is precious.

On the topic of birds, here's another example, this shot was taken a number of years ago as a gift for my mother. These birds lived close to our house, and would fly over in a very specific pattern, constantly chatting to each other to harvest our dog's fur that had been shed all over the yard, presumably for their nest. My Mum loved these birds and it really brightened her day to see them while they were around.

It took me hours and hours of waiting to get just a handful of good photos. She appreciated the gift and so it was worth it.

Eloquent Graffiti

I find street art interesting. The term is really just a socially acceptable way of saying vandalism. Graffiti even sounds cool, the way it rolls off the tongue. Below are a few interesting pieces of art that I caught on my camera phone.

I don't remember where I found this. But it fits with the graffiti theme.

I just like the idea of this one. It's not fantastic to look at, but I'm always excited when someone else has read the book.

This is my favorite. I snapped it up on campus at Uni. I just think it's beautiful, the lines on the cat are nice and subtle/absent in some spots which makes it seem lighter because you eyes just fill in what's missing.

Watercolor Techniques at Wyndham Art Supplies

The last few posts have been about my watercolor paintings, and I mentioned the course I took a while ago, but fail to go into detail. Well, here it is...

In May and June I took a watercolor techniques course at Wyndham Art Supplies. It was a great class. I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn how to handle this medium, as I find it is one of the more difficult ones. With acrylic, it's quite easy to just use straight out of the tube. If you make a mistake, you can go over it (in theory).

I've always liked the idea of watercolor, but I never really knew how to use it properly. I liked that Karen provided simple instructions like: Watercolor, no matter how intense the pigment, is supposed to have the consistency of...water.

The other thing I liked about the class was that while we learned techniques, we actually made finished pieces. Which is much more satisfying that having sheets and sheets of practice.

Painting the First: Aurora Borealis.
For this painting we learned about wet on wet techniques for the sky (along with a kind of paper mounting). We also learned some dry brush techniques for the tree silhouettes.

Painting the Second: Northern Ontario Lake at Dawn
This project taught us about graded washes, wet-on-wet, dry brush and layering. I ran into a bit of a snag in that my land mass became gigantic. We created the reflection first and that was done with wet-on-wet, which you have little control over. Otherwise, it's still quite pretty.

Painting the Third: A meadow
This is my favorite. This project was used to teach us about composition, layering and texture, salt techniques (not used in this one), perspective, clouds and grasses, color theory and effective mixing/use of greens.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the three paintings. The first two I gave away as gifts, the third I've got in a safe plastic sheath. I take it out from time to time to have a gander at it. I'm really glad I took and course and I look forward to other watercolor classes (that I can afford haha).

Independent watercolor

So, I just did a wonderful watercolor course at Wyndham Art Supplies and I learned TONS! It was nice to get some technical instruction, but more on the course later.

I bought a bunch of watercolor supplies for my birthday and yesterday was the first day that I did some painting on my own since the course ended, more importantly, it was a completely novel idea, not a copy of something we did in class. It was nice. It's a really small piece and it took me several hours (with all of the waiting), but it finally gave me a chance to use the silver and gold watercolors that I failed to resist in the store. Fortunately, the masking fluid (see above) resisted the washes really well (hoho) and I got a really bright silver moon and vibrant golden hare.

I've had a bit of a thing with hares lately. For a long time, I had an affinity with rabbits. No, it's not because of their breeding habits. In second year, I took part in a guided meditation for a poetry course. When we were asked to visualize an animal, I got a rabbit and it stuck. The change into a hare specifically came recently. Mostly I really REALLY like a line from Terry Pratchet's newest Tiffany Aching book "I shall Wear Midnight":

"The hare runs into the fire.
The hare runs into the fire.

The fire it takes her, she is not burned.
The fire it loves her, she is free"

There will probably be a few more peices involving hares.

Anyway, below is the finished product. It's not perfect, but I'm really quite proud of it. I painted it on this recycled cotton paper that has a really textured finish. I think it gave it a nice effect.

Colours: Indigo, prussian blue, olive green, hooker's green, veridian, pyrelene green, alizarin crimson, (to mute the greens), quinacridone gold, cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, gold and silver.

Father's Day gifts

My parents live far away, so gift giving tends to be difficult to say the least. I've found that the easiest gifts tend to be paper in nature. So I'll paint something for a holiday or birthday and send it to them. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than mailing something three-dimensional. Also, I can say that it's just documents and there's never any duties on their end. Here are two paintings I made for my Dad and the corresponding mess.

And now....for something different

Hello,
I've decided that I want to create a blog of my creative endeavors.
So, this will be a catalog of anything I do that's not sciency.
Hurrah!
A purpose!

This is just a post to start off the creative products posts.
Artiness will ensue.

Over and out...