Cath Sheard Art

Tag: mixed media

  • What we love vs what inspires

    What we love vs what inspires

    Alan and I went bush for the weekend. I love being out in nature – trees, hills, quiet, no power or cell cover. No other people. Listening to Morepork at night, watching Tui during the day. Bliss!

    I knew Alan would be doing his thing during the day. We both accept I have limited physical capacity some days. I had prepped two small art journals, and took water soluble crayons and pencils, and a few other bits and pieces. The journals are a new brand for me, and turns out the paper isn’t as durable as I like despite being a bit dearer than some of my fav journals. I bought them to try because they were 30% off. I also wish I’d taken actual watercolours, but both those problems are incidental.

    What’s fascinating, as an artist, is while I absolutely love being in the bush it doesn’t inspire me to paint in the way I expect it to. It might just be that I haven’t done enough to loosen up and create the sort of work I like, but I’m also not sure I want to. And yet when I go down South I find the water, and the colours of the Hokitika Gorge, inspire me to create over and over and over.

    What we love, and what inspires us to create, are not necessarily the same thing. Why? I have no idea really, but I’m mulling it over. In the meantime, here’s some samples of the pages I did do…

  • Week 5 – self portrait

    Week 5 – self portrait

    This week’s Wanderlust25 lesson was taught by Shawn Petite, who I’ve followed for years. The project involved journaling, prepping the page with collage papers and ephemera that have meaning to you, and using washes of colour that relate in some way to what you wrote. The last step was a self portrait. I won’t go into all the details with it being a paid course.

    We started by doing a practice colour wheel. I chose to go slightly off the primary colours, and used DWM Lemon, Lapis and Ruby, with DWM Umber and White, and Liquitex Parchment. It’s not a combination I’d tried on a colour wheel before and I like it.

    People who know me well will understand why “voice” is the word I ended up with to summarise my journaling…

    My initial layers, there’s journaling under the collage.
    My colour wheel, complete with a smear thanks to Sabrina’s paw!
    My completed page.

  • What makes a landscape?

    Sometimes I veer off into florals, faces, or other distractions, but my deepest artistic love is the landscape. Memories of the landscape, fragments of the landscape: colours, shapes, shadows, glimpses…

    I’m interested in what makes something read as landscape. Is it the colours? Shapes? The way things are stacked up from land to sky? I’ve been exploring the idea in small 6×6 collages. As with any series, they’re getting looser and more abstract as the series progresses.

  • Wanderlust week 4 completed

    This tested my patience a bit, but it was fun too and I’m pleased with the end result. I’ve glued it into my art journal so I can fold it out and add to it if I want. The panorama shot is a bit off and wobbly because I’m not that steady but it gives you the general idea.

  • Working on Wanderlust week 4

    I’m working on Wanderlust week 4, with Kasia Avery. The project is designed to be slow, which is not how I normally work, but I’m determined to try. So far, so good … although I did have trouble with the stitching ripping the hand made paper because the gel medium on the paper wasn’t completely dry. So I used gel medium to add more paper to the back, and tried to keep going – and of course it ripped again. Did I learn to wait? Sort of 😂

    Here’s what I have done so far: