Personal palette

A couple of months ago I began experimenting with my color palette.  Then coincidentally Lynn's May lesson (for Year of the Spark) is about defining one's personal palette.

I doodled my current color palette:

Created under the influence of a rain-soaked Spring :-)

Watercolor with music

The Year of the Spark lesson with Lynn Whipple is a further exploration of responding to music in the creative process.

Watercolor paintings with loose drawing... to music :-)

Mixed media - watercolor, graphite and ink

With the music

Lynn Whipple is teaching the Year of the Spark lesson for the second half of April... using music to influence mark making.

I don't have music playing while I work in my studio unless I am doing chores (cleaning and tidying up for the next project).  When seasons permit, I prefer to listen to the birds' songs or soft rainfall.  Or I like to listen to recordings of nature or lectures by people with engaging speaking voices.

For this lesson, I chose music that had a slow to medium tempos with occasional tempo changes.

The "music" warm up sketches:

Bits and bobs by nature

The current Year of the Spark lesson - go out and gather things (as if you were a crow) and then use what you found to (1) create something and (2) create something else to share, show appreciation, give back.

Although Spring is here and there are green leaves and a few blossoms out, most of what I gathered was one version or another of straw- colored.

This is the "created" thing:

Happy little critter.

See? Very sweet :-)

 And this is the thing to be shared:

A scroll with a message.

"Deployed" in some shrubs.

 

The message :-)

                              

Abstraction

More Year of the Spark - Carla and Lynn both teach and this time Carla is up.

I think the goal of this lesson is to become comfortable with abstraction.  

Essentially, look at a scene with the intent of creating a sketch that minimizes photo-reality and instead focuses on lines and shapes, patterns, forms, etc. that are appealing.  

And then from that sketch create another one where the focus changes from that of "representation"  to one of "qualities", e.g., abstraction, of those shapes, forms, patterns.

Here are three sets of sketches.  For each set, the sketch on the top is the interpretation and the sketch on the bottom is the abstraction.

First set:

park scene

abstracted - emphasizing line variation, form

Second set:

amusement park

abstracted - emphasizing shape and shadow

Third set:

kitchen

abstracted - emphasizing form and texture

I enjoy working in the abstract :-)

Reverse painted mixed media acrylic panel

Here's a second acrylic panel (mixed media assignment for Year of the Spark  - Collage and Reverse Oil Painting on Plexiglas® class by Lynn Whipple).

The panel features my boy Remy when he was about a year old - he's six now:

"DOGINT: Dog Intelligence"

This is the back (painted and collaged) side:

I used acrylic paint instead of oils.

I made this panel because I wanted to look up from my work and see my Golden looking back at me :-)
 
  

Collage and Paint on Plexi

Lynn Whipple ( Year of the Spark, Lesson 3 ) shared her experience of collage and reverse oil painting on Plexiglas®.

I used acrylic paint instead of oils mainly because acrylics dry quickly.  Painting on the reverse side is a slow process because there is a lot of turning back to front to check how the painting is progressing.

"1 2 3 Change" on non-glare acrylic panel

Having completed one of these acrylic panels I have to say that this technique is very messy - at least the way I do it - which gave me another reason to be happy that I chose acrylics.  Cleanup is much faster than with oils.

I like the technique a lot...messiness notwithstanding :-)

Collage...cards?

From the January lesson from Lynn Whipple for Year of the Spark – select a “hero” image and combine it with other design elements to create cards.

Oy, I have a suspicion that I may not have done the specific assignment as I was not thinking “card” or event e.g. birthday.  I did create these, though:

"Life is a Twirl"

elements: "flower girl" image, my hand lettering - colored and cut out, monoprint I liked but had not taken to completion

"dispersal of the keys"

elements: a "Pulcinella" image, metal keys, torn pieces from my slush pile, gold paint pen, black paper

 The process was thought-provoking and enjoyable :-)

Patterns - doodling, tangling

I enjoy doodling and if I have a quad pad in front of me, it usually ends up looking like this:

Lynn Whipple's lesson for part 2 of Year of the Spark has an element of pattern making.  For the class assignment - I began with some color:

Pattern 1

Pattern 2

  

For the third pattern page, random doodling and tangling with some shading and no color:

Pattern 3

Pattern-making is relaxing.  When I put away my paper and pen, I have created some backgrounds that may be useful or if nothing else... collage fodder :-)

Mixed Media Dogs

The "Year of the Spark" began with that great one-liner exercise (see this post) and then the mixed media exploration.  I posted images (here)  but only one image of the DOGS... this little guy:

I want to share the other ones also.  Here are my other interpretations of a single one-liner dog using at least two different media:

Pigma Micron pen and graphite

acrylic paint, wax pastels, gel ink and graphite

acrylic paint, pastels

acrylic paint, graphite

Isn't it interesting - the choice of media and the how it affects the direction of the piece?

The Year of the Spark just began... and it is being co-taught by Carla Sonheim and Lynn Whipple :-)