Cath Sheard Art

Author: Catherine Barker-Sheard

  • CJS17 day 7

    Day 7 featured artist Jodi Ohl, whose work I have admired for a long time. Exciting! The challenge was to work in her style, using Tim Holtz Distress Crayons. Challenge accepted…

    I applied two layers of gesso to my page to give it extra strength because I knew I’d be using quite a bit of water and pushing the crayons around. I normally love Tim Holtz products but find the Distress Crayons, which I’ve had a while, a bit difficult to use. They don’t move as easily as I want and it’s hard to put anything on top of them as they’re quite waxy. I used Aquarelle pencils for the initial linework and then a felt-tip calligraphy pen for the final lines as it worked ok over the waxy surface.

    My initial page was based on a photo of Faith. I got partway into it before realising it wouldn’t work because Jodi’s style needs a definite outline so I scrapped it and started afresh. I’m okay with this as a finished art journal page; it’s enough like Jodi’s to please me but has my take on it too.

    8-jan-jodi-ohl 

  • CJS17 day 6

    Today’s artist was Jimmy Leslie, who talked about using mediums such as grit mediums and gloss medium in more structural ways including through stencils. I had a bunch of ideas for using mediums I already have but didn’t think about the layout as a whole. The result is an ugly, but useful, page that reminds of his tips and techniques!

    The big red flowers have Golden Fine Garnet medium under them, used through a stencil. The green heavy body acrylic in the background was thinned down with Golden gloss polymer, which I also used as a glue. The red heart and the yellow circle in the centre of the collaged circle on the left are gel skins. The collages elements were a laser photocopy of some of my work which I coated with clear gesso so I could use a pen to add details.

    6-jan-jimmy-leslie

  • CJS17 day 5

    Today’s artist, Pam Carriker, used Pan Pastels to create a portrait using white, black and  shades & tones of yellow. I don’t have Pan Pastels but decided this was a good chance to practice faces using a limited colour range; I picked white, lemon yellow and indigo. I printed out a high contrast photo off the internet and marked the main features on my page before starting to paint. I’m reasonably pleased with the end result, it’s certainly better than I normay achieve!

    4

  • CMP17 week 1

    #colourmepositive has started for 2017. I’ve decided to do single spreads this time, so it’s a square format. In 2016 I used a particular style all year and I love the cohesive look of the journal when I flip through it. This year I want to use a denser, more collagey style and develop my own mark making a bit more. This is one reason for doing single spreads; it’s easier to get the page looking really full. I am very much inspired by the work of Frieda Oxenham; you can see her work here.

    I used Tim Holtz Distress paints, rubber stamps, Fude ball pen, white Posca pen, Dylusions paints, Dina Wakley wing stamps, StencilGirl and Tim Holtz stencils and collage materials.

    0117

     

  • CJS17 day 3

    Day three with UK artist Glyn Macey was about mark making with ‘rubbish’ and optical versus physical colour mixing. To embed the learning re the differences in the mixing styles I did some samples in my art journal using Lemon Yellow, Napthol Red Light and Phthalo Green (blue shade). These are Daler Rowney acrylics.

    day-3