Sunday, May 01, 2016

Iris

While I work, I have a browser window open to Pinterest to poke around while my computer processes files, etc. I stumbled across Dawn Nicole and her online art-lettering group class thing. There's a lot of moving parts and I haven't quite got it figured out, but she has a monthly challenge group on Facebook and Instagram (‪#‎DNDChallenge‬) and I just happened upon it on the last week of April. Here's my first entry for the group.

This took me far longer than I had planned and it was killing me. I woulda been able to knock this out in acrylic, but watercolor is so not my thing and I labored over it. I couldn't control the saturation like I wanted.  re-applying a stroke when the paint is still wet results in the pigment spreading. (duh) After a while I gave up, found a broken colored pencil and outlined the flower for definition. The entire process was kinda painful.

The background was pre-primed with Distress mini pads. I'm new to stamping and I don't understand how people can get such juicy colors from them. I was pretty certain my mini-pads were dried out until I heard they should be stored upside down. I tried that for a few weeks, came back to them and hoped for the best. They were wetter than before, but it would take a lot of effort to color a tag with these. So now I'm not sure if I need to re-ink them or buy the larger, normal sized pads. On the other hand, the background worked nicely with this sketch.
If anybody reading this can tell me has any experience with wet or dry mini-pads, I'd love to hear from you!

I've been doing the Artist's Way Morning Pages without skipping so far. Which is pretty incredible since I left for Seattle when I started! They've helped me focus a lot and I've seen little things kinda come together here and there. I haven't done any of the exercises though. I'm sure they're rather important, but I'd much rather apply energy to projects than to sitting and thinking. I already do that for those Pages.

Of course I find out about the latest #100daychallenge one month into it.

This is another thing I'm working on. I did the initial resin pour about a month ago, but finally got my act together and put together the inclusions.
I can't decide whether they'll be pendants or magnets. I guess I'll have more of an idea once they come out of the molds.

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