Mixed media textured gesso...on wood :-)

More Year of the Spark class work - this lesson is from Carla.  And I recorded a couple of in-process steps this time.

Phase 1 - sketch on wood and gesso ("texturized"... is that a word?):

The beginning of many layers...

Phase 2 - color

Watercolor

Final - massaged the background with Carla's "rub and buff" technique and added details:

Details in graphite, ink, conte crayon and charcoal.

And Carla always begins each lesson with a warm-up exercise.  This time it was one-liner drawing of the same face:

Inked.

Media Montage of Dogs and Birds

"Year of the Spark", the year-long online class I am taking, kicked off with a lot of drawing.  All of the one-liner drawings of dogs and birds (see this blog post ) were useful in more exploration and experimentation.

I chose two to develop further using a different medium for each critter.  These are the ten variations for the dog and the bird:

All manner of dogs :-)

Um... birds :-)

Spark Those 1-Liners

Plunging into part one of the first assignment from Carla for 2015: Year of the Spark, the task is a fun warm-up exercise, one-liners.

One-liners are continuous line (can't lift the pen from the paper) drawings that get the hand moving.  They are very quickly rendered to help push thinking, or over-thinking, out of the driver's seat.  These one-liners took 10 - 12 minutes to complete.

Ready for lots of drawings?

Fun stuff :-)

Links:  http://www.carlasonheim.com/yearofthespark/

From sketch to sculpture

The creative impetus for this post is from an assignment for Carla Sonheim's 2014: Year of the Fairy Tale online class.

This is the sketch:

Hm-m-m, I wondered how I could fashion those legs... ones that would allow this horse to stand on its own.  I used a spool of wire.  I didn't know how to create proper "joints", therefore, conceptually I would be creating a three-dimensional "one-liner".

With my wire as my "ink" and needle-nose pliers as my nib, this is the result:

Begin at one point and keep going.

3-D one liner :-)

For bulk, I cover the wire form with aluminum foil and then applied the modeling "clay":

Yay, still standing.

Big head and big tail.

I really enjoyed making this little guy.  I still have a lot of wire left on the spool...