Friends and Neighbors

It's been a long road, but finally, the ArtLab is functional! It's still a bit of a train wreck, but I can get to all of my wonderful toys! Yay!!

Some friends of mine from the author side of my life decided we needed to form a small sub-group to work on a different brand of creativity. We had our first Google Hangout today. It was supposed to last about an hour, but we didn't close out until FOUR hours later! It was a LOT of fun!

We started by talking about new toys we had from Christmas (ahem, we did get Tim to take the plastic wrap off his goodies), and shared some projects we had done recently. Jade showed us a rocking watercolored bird piece that graced a front magazine cover. She's amazing with the watercolors, folks. Once we get everything ginning along, I'll try to link you all up with some of their art. Seriously good talent!

Jade pointed us to a 'new' blog (new to me) that posts a new prompt every Friday. It's Illustration Friday, and this week's prompt was "Wheel". In true Naperville fashion, we jumped in with both feet! We had a little conversation about how to approach the prompt, then each of us dove in to creating our piece. It was really cool. Here's mine:

7x10 inch Mixed Media Canson journal

I chose to use a 'wheel' to represent the circular passing of seasons. Lately the weather has been center-stage, so I'm sure those latent thoughts surfaced in this piece. I will be adding some text to this, and I'll post the final piece later.

I painted the basic tree frame with Neocolor II water soluble wax pastels over a mixed acrylic/pearl mist background created from leftovers of another project. I stamped lots of leaves then painted those. I worked distress inks into the tree crown to mimic the different colors of leaf progression through the year. Then I added depth and dimension with round dot stamps (Papertrey Ink), and mistable masks. I also used my Copic markers to give better definition to the tree and some other bits on the page.

Next we played a familiar game of word associations. We started with banana, took a detour to Mt. Everest, and wound our way back to dinosaurs. Tim was our tour guide and read our list back to us. The resulting prompt? Plaid Dinosaurs! Rawr!!

3.5 x 3.5 inch tile on Strathmore Mixed Media paper
Copic multiliners shaded with Copic markers

I came up with my take on a prehistoric (dino) fish hanging out with some bananas, a bird and done in black and white zendoodling. My plaid isn't the traditional plaid, but I think it turned out just fine. That's what we did today.

If you want to use these prompts and come up with your own interpretation  feel free. Be sure to come back and link me to your work, because I want to see it!

Thanks so much for your patience while I got my studio back together. I'm so glad you dropped by!

Ta for now,

~ky