New Year's Resolution #1 Painted, Scanned & Printed!

I haven't made many New Year's resolutions, but one thing I did promise myself was that this year I was going to make my own cover for my calendar. The calendar that I use has a clear sleeve for a cover, which means that you can slip any paper into it to make your own cover. Clever! I had the same calendar last year, but even though I had a whole year to do it, I didn't manage to change the image that came with the calender even once. Pretty pathetic. So I promised myself that this year will be different.

(The text says "Make your own cover")

Said and done. I worked through a Dina Wakely workshop today, and when the page was finished I realised that it would be the perfect cover for January! The workshop was all about what you can do when you've worked so many layers on a page that you reach the 'Now what?!?' stage. You know, when you realise that you loved your work four layers ago, but now you feel slightly sick when you look at it. The answer is that you cover up most of it, and by the magic of acrylic paint your page is saved and you have some neat artwork to enjoy.

This is the stage when I loved my page. So I took a photograph of it, as a memento, because I knew that Dina was going to make me push the page to the extreme.

I particularly love this part. Now, say good-bye to it.

At this point I wasn't very happy about the page any longer. But I kept the faith.

And here is the final page, after the big cover-up. Pretty amazing what a bit of paint can do. I scanned the artwork and printed the image with my laser printer, and voilà, my very own cover. And the first New Year's resolution has already been fulfilled!

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you'll have a wonderful and creative 2015!

Messing Around

I've had four days off from work, two of which I spent with Mum, and the other two were meant to be an art retreat arranged for myself by myself. Well... On Monday I seemed to have alls sorts of things going on except for arty things. In the afternoon, when I finally got my art supplies out, I was struck by the most awful creative block. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything. Performance anxiety rampant. At last I pulled out my cheapest sketchbook (the one with the awful paper) and drew an unplanned and ugly portrait of myself spewing fire. I coloured it with coloured pencils and didn't care whether I stayed within the lines or not.

The ugly self-portrait did the trick. I remembered what I always tend to forget: it's better to draw SOMETHING or ANYTHING than nothing at all. It doesn't matter if it's ugly. It's a start, a warm-up. The good stuff comes later. I put on Paula Phillips' workshop 'Textured & Layered Backgrounds' and started messing around with gesso, Inktense pencils and acrylic paint. At the moment my hands have what has been called a "mixed-media manicure". My nails are both purple and silver. My arm is tired from rubbing off layers of acrylic paint. My pants are in the wash, as I managed to splatter white paint on them. You can probably tell I had a good time.

Here are two of the backgrounds I started on yesterday. There are more layers to come. The technique is basically to add layer after layer of paint, and each time you add a new layer, you remove some of it to reveal the underlying layers. It's very exciting, and a good workout too, as you really have to put some back into it, as Paula says.