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Friday, March 27, 2015

The rest of the birds; on to the next challenge

 

Day 12, Robin

It’s spring so I had to include a robin.  Here are the rest of the birds…...

day 13 the sparrowday 14 bird on a wire

day 15 the orioleDay 16, Bonapartes Gull

Day 17, chickadee day 18, tufted titmouseday 19, Michigan Loonday 20, hummingbird

I’m really pleased with how the birds came out; not so thrilled with the still life sketches in a similar sketchbook. This one is only 10 days, after tomorrow I’m half way home.  One thing that has surprised me about these sketchbooks is that watercolor crayon in many cases can be used right on top of the acrylic and show up.

Day 1, a pear Day 2, 2 pear

day 3, wine and bread day 4 more pears

Saturday, March 14, 2015

The Bird Challenge & Handmade Sketchbooks

My most recent work has been non-representational and mixed media.   And most recently, I’ve been working on a Challenge my friend Valri Ari threw out on Facebook.  More on that later but here’s today’s piece for the challenge.

Day 11, Lin's shorebird 

The mixed media is a combination of monoprint and collage.  I’m  using more acrylics and one of the things I do when I’m using them is keep an extra sheet of paper next to me that I can use to blot some of the paint off a piece.  I also use the paper to clean my brayer as I’m printing..My intent in using that paper was to create papers for collage.

page for day 2

Enter sketchbooks.  I use a lot of them.  There are always a couple in the studio and I keep one in my purse and in my car.  I thought I would try to make some signatures of my own using the same paper but without anything on it.  The idea being to use the signatures as the sketchbook and eventually putting some of them together into one book.

One of the blogs I follow is Jane Davies.  She is the one who gave me the idea of lifting paint onto a separate sheet and she sometimes puts those sheets together into a handmade sketchbook.  I thought it would be a good way to work out some non-representational ideas so I made a few of those too.

some sketchbooks

A spread in one can end up looking like this….

sketchbook spread

The idea is to connect them somehow or use each page individually. I hadn’t been brave enough to use them until Valri Ari’s bird challenge came along.  The first challenge was birds, 20 in 20 days.  One of my signatures has 20 individual pages so I got brave and decided to give it a shot.  I am loving the results… Here’s the cover of the Bird Challenge…

day 1 the cover

For this one I’m doing individual pages, here are the rest that are done to date..

day 2 owlday 3 cardinal

day 4 crowday 5 female cardinal

day 6 roosterquail, day 7day 8 another owlDay 9, a gull

Day 10, a shorebirdDay 11, Lin's shorebird

You can see that the last two are from a spread that is in the middle. 

I’m looking forward to the next challenge and using another of my signatures.