Craft Space Envy

This month's craft space envy.....

I seem to really love the tidy cubby holes!

Book Review - Painted Pages

My second book review! Painted Pages

I saw this book recommended on a forum but I can't remember where how bad is that! Oh well at least I am sharing the book with you now.

I have to be totally honest and up front and say that I am not a big fan of her art work. I am sorry but I am not. But then in the art world not all pieces appeal to everyone and people accept that. My stuff doesn't appeal to many too and I am totally OK with that. I am sure most artists are because they are creating stuff for a particular audience.

That said I really liked this book.

There was lots of content to read as well as techniques and inspiration and motivation.

I have a sketch book and most of the time the pages are blank because I just don't know what to put in the sketch book. I tend to just have things in my head or I sit down with a blank canvas and just paint whatever comes to me at the time. This book encourages you to use a sketch book and gives you great ideas and techniques to get you started and help you on your way. I had never thought to take it with me to a coffee shop and just write down colour combinations that appealed to me. I do now!

A definite read from my POV!!

Here is my video review...

**Please note this is my own personal opinion and I have created this review myself to share with others. I have not been paid, sponsored or endorsed by anyone to create provide this review** 

Explore You with collage

This week at college we moved on to collage to get us to look more at the shapes of things. When we draw it is easy to just get on with it but when we collage from still life we have to look more at the shapes so as to make the correct piece of collage material. I have to say I got on far better with this method and I had fun.

I started off doing  a collage of the still life in front of me and this is how it turned out:

And then I decided that I wanted to have some fun and do my own thing so I created this which is far more me as you can tell from the piece "Explore You"

Another share...

Okey dokes another share from my learnings at college...

This was created using dry soft pastels again another medium that I haven't used before. I really enjoyed using them actually and had a lot of fun.

I am not terribly great at drawing from an object in front of me. I find that I look at the object, my brain processes it and then I draw what my brain thinks it is seeing or wants to see not what is in front of me. It is so weird and I think the tutor is finding it as frustrating as I am. I think I will find it a lot easier when we move on to creating from imagination!

So here we go:

As you can see it does look like a shoe but it doesn't quite look like the shoe that was in front of me!!!

What I have done at school...

I thought I would start to share with you some of the things I am learning and what I have done at art school!

So as you know I paint with acrylics all the time but this is about learning new techniques and new materials.

This is a drawing using only black drawing ink which I have never used before and which I found to be really hard to try and get all the different shadings it's pretty rubbish huh!