The Wayfaring Wordhack

This week, instead of showing you the inside of my sketchbook, I shall show you the outside because asakiyume  recently spoke about stamps. :)

I actually have several sketchbooks, but one of them has a paper cover that is stained and looks rather ratty, so I decided to cover it with stamps (back when we were still in France).  This is taking a while because snail mail is not much in vogue these days and we are living in a country where we don't receive mail through regular channels. :P.  Also, glue-stick adhesive doesn't seem the best for the job and I am forever sticking down the edges of the stamps.  It, therefore, continues to look ratty but in a more artistic, well-used way...or so I like to tell myself. ;)


On the creative front, some writing and some art happened.  I guess we can color me happy.

( because I need to stop worrying about things sucking and just share from time to time ) How about you?  How was your week?

Following my post yesterday, I sat down and wrote a couple hundred words (Actually, I just counted and I got 750!). I meant to storyboard my children's book this week, too, but did not get around to it with all the social whirl and sick kiddos.

My art this week mainly consisted of doing lots of abstract landscapes, following YouTube tutorials with varying degrees of success. Some pieces only yielded tiny snips of interesting effects. While it is great fun to play with paint*--learning how to produce different effects, seeing how the pigments react, etc--I don't know that I will do many more because I want to build certain skills at this point and don't see an immediate benefit to mastering abstract-yielding techniques.**

Salvaging:

( mini abstract landscapes )

These are small, the two on the left only being min 6  and max 10 cm per side, and I cut them large in case I want to frame them with a mat.

After five months in Lebanon, a fellow expat asked me how we are settling in and if there are any challenges I am facing or things I am missing. Not to sound blasée, I told him, but I am used to the moving and adapting to different cultures, climates, and commodities--or lack thereof--and don't feel overwhelmed by anything in particular at this point. However, when I left the USA for France over two decades ago, one of my responses to this question was New Mexico skies: its sunsets, mile-high cloud formations, and thunderstorms. Prompted by that, I sought out a landscape photo that spoke to a bit of that longing and tried my hand at capturing that awesome sky presence:
( New Mexico landscape )

Of course, it must be acknowledged that it is (yet again) an over-worked attempt. Part of that can be explained by a trip to the art supply store giving me the indigo that I actually needed for the sky instead of the ultramarine blue I had on hand when I laid down the first swirling mass of color, but still. Compositionally, I know the two downward sloping edges allow the eyes to "run" off the sides of the page. The leftward slope was present in the reference photo, but the land on the right was flatter. However, I could not bring myself to cover those serendipitous, feathery bleeds that looked like distant rain. C'est la vie.



For the above painting, I used some of the things I learned in this tutorial, while refraining from working too much into the foreground as suggested in the video. When I did the piece below by following the tutorial, I feel like working over the foreground made the piece more illustrative, which was not what I was going for. This is not to say that what the artist did was not good, but that my attempt at applying the advice did not yield the results I wanted:***( stormy sky )




The exercise I was probably the most pleased with this week was this tiny collage inspired by French artist Manon Gauthier:

( little collage )

A nice side benefit of having lots of "throwaway" watercolor pieces is that they can be salvaged for other projects.


* Also the cost of art supplies being rather ouchie, especially watercolor paper, makes me disinclined to continuously engage in play. Sheesh, even my asterisk comment needs an asterisk so I can acknowledge that I am indeed well-versed--being an unschooling mom and all--on the virtues, benefits and necessities of play. ;) I am not knocking play, but I need some structured practice as well.

** On the other hand, the point of doing abstracts was to encourage me to loosen up, a lesson not yet acquired as evinced by the showing. I might not be done with them yet.

***If you do watch the video, you will see that the artist does two works, the (in my opinion) more successful thumbnail for the tutorial and then the piece she makes in front of the camera. Further proof that you can't win them all. Looking at that thumbnail again makes me want to have another go, especially since I have some Payne's Gray now.

This week, I let the Dynamic Sketching slide, but I was otherwise good on working on all the other types of artwork I set for myself to do, and since I am aiming for 2 out of 3, I am right on target. Hooray.

I also started typing up my picture book text. It is a story I have told many times, but I have to consider what the images will tell and what I need to portray in prose. And, "a story from my mouth" is not exactly page-worthy and must be made so.

Voilà, a smattering of the art from this week:( watercolor and sketches this way )








I really must get out and take some more photos to use for the composition project.

 I didn't do my wash as planned, but, here, have a phone photo. This is some of the work I was able to do over the last couple of days :


I hope to do a write up about what I liked, what I didn't, what I learned, etc., and post the final in the next couple of days, but life has been really life-y these past few days, leaving me little time for what I want to get done.

here is a link to the other progress photos.