Lifebook weeks 10 and 12

Week 10 was a lovely lesson from Effy Wild - a tree created with lots of layering and glazing. I folowed the demonstration videos very closely for this lesson, so I can't take any credit for the design right down to the colour choices. The glazing was amazingly effective, it's a technique where you have to plan ahead - creating underpainting to glaze over. When I paint on canvas it's usually not very planned, I kind of do a random underpainting just to cover the blank canvas, and then see what that suggests and turn it into something! There is a lot of relying on chance and hoping that inspiration will appear... On the other hand when I do a linocut it's carefully drawn out and planned in advance, so maybe I could get my head around planning out a painting to use glazing!

I spent so long on week 10 that I didn't get around to the week 11 lesson.

Week 12 was a watercolour with Susana Tavares. Watercolour is a medium I'm not confident with - particularly because you can't go over your mistakes! So I  was surprised how much I enjoyed this lesson and learned a lot. Again I followed the demonstration very closely.

I do feel a bit ambivalent about copying the lessons so closely. I guess in the past that's how artists learned to paint, by copying old masters. These days it's all about being original, doing something new, it's hard to put that attitude aside. If nothing else I'm putting together a folder of techniques that will be a great reference for me in the future.

Lifebook weeks 7 and 9 - pat pats and flowers

Week 7 of lifebook was a little bonus lesson called Pat pats taught by Donna Mulholland. You had to think of things you'd like to pat yourself on the back for from the past week (not that easy!) And incorporate those into a page with collaged paper. Making the sheet for collage was lovely, just playing freely with watercolour and acrylics, masking out areas, it was amazing how good it looked once cut up - and will be a good technique to use to make papers for cards.

I skipped week 8, partly because it didn't grab me and partly because I had a busy week - I did a week and a half of work at one of my old jobs filling in for a friend who was on leave!

For week 9 there are two bonus lessons - I've only done one so far - flowers of gratitude with Tamara Laporte. This was based on some of Tam's sketchbook pages, working with a limited range of materials eg that you might take on holiday
.

I worked with a handful of markers - scribbling onto a plastic palette and then picking up the colour with a wet brush and painting it onto the paper. I did use some watercolour at the end for the strong colour of the hair and parts of the background. It was interesting to see what could be done with basic materials like kids quality markers.

Often I will make the excuse that I don't have time to get all my paints out... it was lovely to get a peep into another artists journals and to be reminded that you don't need a whole studio of gear to make an artwork.