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!
#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.
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 two was about being inspired by the work of Mystele Kirkeeng. She mixes outsider art with folk art and it’s amazing! Her work uses lots of layers, collage, bright colours and mark making, and she often works over the top of an existing work.
In the same spirit, I worked over the top of a page I’d never finished and added lots of collage elements before doing the self-portrait in outsider-ish colours and adding symbols I love, such as the feather and flowers. I also painted the negative spaces in blocks of colour, something I don’t normally do, and love the effect. Although the self-portrait is pretty ho hum, this work feels like a real step forward because I love the way the background turned out.
BTW the word ‘shrinking’ and the text to the left of my body relate to my weight loss of around 37kg so far. Now that I am not so sick I am starting to feel the positive impacts of the weight loss (finally!).
I’m doing Creative Jumpstart 2017; I’ve done CJS before and am excited to be doing it again. Because it’s a paid cass, I’ll be sharing what I’ve done but not the step-by-steps (in fairness to the tutors). These pages started with a black backround, and have stencilling and Gelli printing on packing tape, as well as the lyrics of songs by HIM.
Cath Sheard Art 