Play Day with Artist Friends

Posted by Diane Duncan on January 5, 2016 in Featured Flag, This And that! | 2 comments

My Tuesdays have been designated art play day for the foreseeable future!

Three friends and I spent the day chatting, laughing, and generally having fun as we worked through a couple of art exercises.

Journal Background #2 – a work in progress

I hosted today so I organized a warm up exercise for the first half hour – exploring different material to use when adding colour to a junk journal page. The journals were a gift I prepared for each of our group before Christmas. I wanted to keep the exercises simple so that we could relax and not get lost in our own efforts.

Each person was asked to gesso a few pages before we met. One added colour to the gesso and used a gray gesso another page. The rest of us used either clear or white gesso. For colour we tried water media, chalk and oil pastels, wax crayons as resist, acrylic and watercolour paints. The hit of the day were the children’s Crayola pens loaded with water media and sporting felt tip nibs. They had strong colours and created interesting effects when applied to wet surface or were misted after application. All media were low cost items already in my stash. Another time we will checkout some of the pricier products that are available!

Journal Background #1 -First layer down!

Then we moved on to a sketching. I decided to choose faces as the focus – something I avoid doing whenever possible. For the ‘exercise’ I gave each person a ‘proportions of the face’ diagram and the challenge to start with a circle, a triangle and a square and turn each into a face. Again the emphasis was to relax, to not get lost in the search for perfection and to refresh our memories of sketching techniques.

I had previously provided some U-tube links and most people had checked out some of the whimsical, Manga or realistic how-to demonstrations. I’m afraid my efforts in both exercises were spectacularly uninspired! Others had varying levels of satisfaction with their pieces. After lunch we returned to the activity of our choice and chatted as we worked.

Sketching Exercise – Faces Looking forward to getting some practice and applying shading and colour!

Art is such a solitary activity. These play day interludes will be a pleasant change of pace. It was a great way to get to know other artists in a relaxed setting.