Well that went by quickly

(To start by stating the obvious) November is at an end already. I’ve been doing my best to fit in creative time when I can. Most days it’s just a bit of drawing in my sketchbook. Here are a couple of the images I’ve created over the past month. I noticed that the heads on … Read more

Art for a cause

If you subscribe to my newsletter or follow my Facebook page, you may already know that my husband’s leukemia has recently returned. The first time he was sick, in 2013, I really struggled to keep making art during his treatment and recovery. This time around, I am trying to make art a priority as much … Read more

Expressive inky layers

I’m still here, working through the exercises in my expressive drawing course. Overall I’m still really enjoying it. The exercises are confirming my love for working in mixed media on paper, so much so that it might be another month or two before I go back to oil painting. These first two images are experiments … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 30

A work in progress for you today, the very last day of Art Every Day Month. Today my expressive drawing course is tackling architecture, which is a different challenge than we’ve had so far. Mostly we’ve been looking at organic shapes until now. How to maintain expressiveness while communicating straight lines and right angles? I … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 26

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I baked a pumpkin pie this morning and now the whole house smells like pie and I’m wondering how I’m going to keep myself from eating the pie before dinner tonight. This was an exercise in discipline, in a way. The idea was to build up the image using only ink wash … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 25

This was an exercise in adding and taking away using pencils, graphite powder, and erasers, leaving a history of mark-making on the page. I think I could have pushed it further, but I started to run out of daylight. I’ve found that I can work comfortably after dark with bolder materials such as ink and … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 23

More experimenting with my new white ink today. As suspected, it’s not as obvious on white paper, even when layered into dark areas. It does add some nice subtle tonal variations in some spots, however. I should try it on a flat surface, where it will have the chance to pool instead of just dripping … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 22

Yay, new art supplies arrived today. I had made an order a while ago, but there were a couple things out of stock that finally got here. One of them was white ink, which I have never worked with before. To test it out, I decided to try the three faces exercise again. I used … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 19

Today I drew three portraits on top of each other, another exercise in my expressive drawing course. It’s interesting, having this course overlap with Art Every Day Month – most of these exercises are things I wouldn’t normally post, but I have enjoyed all the feedback they’ve received. Perhaps I should be posting experiments all … Read more

Art Every Day Month, day 16

Barely getting a post up for today, but I made it. Just fit in a couple of expressive drawing exercises this evening. Thank you so much to all of you who have said lovely encouraging things in the lead-up to my presentation yesterday. I am happy to say that it went really well, despite the … Read more