and now for something a little bit different....

The weekend just passed I had the most amazing time with a small group of other like minded souls in a little coffee shop down town. But as strange as it sounds, we weren't consuming steaming hot beverages and indulging in idle conversation. So what were we up too?

Learning, creating and pushing our artistic boundaries.

Our little town isn't conveniently located by a large metro area and any courses that we may want to participate in at the local college, are scheduled during the day, which is absolutely the wrong time for a stay at home, homeschooling mummy. Instead, I've been satisfying my need to learn from an art teacher by taking advantage of this wonderful little coffee shop, come glorious bookstore and art gallery combined. Heaven! The lovely lady who runs this inspirational shop also adds to her stores versatility by organizing a variety of courses run by professionals for the public to enjoy.

This has been my second time at such an offering. So lucky. Pictured below are some of my creations. But before viewing, I'll share with you a hard lesson I learnt from the inspiring and talented teacher.

Don't create to please another. The intention is dishonest and it interferes with the work you are producing. Create for the pleasure and be in the now and have no fear or worries about what you are doing. Did you know that Picasso would paint enormous works of art only to paint over them and start again! Horrifying, but the motivation of his pieces was from the process and he would push beyond his boundaries and learn from that. The final element I took away from this course was, let your subject speak in your work. What does that last phrase mean? The easiest way for me to explain it is through an example. One of the many subjects presented for us over the weekend was grass. An enormous, dense clump of grass. Heavy at the bottom but sparse at its height. Tall grass, with great soft clumps of seeds gathered at the ends. There was movement in this grass. I could imagine the wind whispering as it passed through its strands. Sharply spiking and falling gracefully, were thin, pale green leaves tapering to sharp ends which I thought I would feel catching on my skirt if I brushed past.

So for the subject of the grass to speak, my creation should have had the elements of density and space, movement, softness and sharpness. There's a picture of my grass further down.

Throughout our time together, the class experimented with a variety of drawing medium and methods. Just a quick mention on a method called contour drawing. I had heard of it but before this had never done it. Contour drawing means (my understanding) to look at your subject whilst you're drawing on your paper. By running the eye carefully and slowly around the edge of the subject we can then communicate what we are seeing with the lines of our drawing... the catch is, you don't look at your paper whilst drawing and the pencil isn't to leave the paper either. Hmmm. Fun to think about.

Here is an example of contour drawings of an iron. The beauty is that the drawing is simple and can communicate the essence of your subject.



Other pieces of work from my weekend of exploration :)

An Ink water wash, a twig as a brush, and a contour drawing of pears with ink.

Charcoal and eraser.
Firstly we blacked out our paper with charcoal and then we were given a subject, in this case a jug. We then 'carved' out the picture of the jug from the charcoal with the eraser.

And this was my final product for the weekend in which I combined several of the different skills I had learnt, to create my interpretation of the 'grass'. What do you think? Does it 'speak' of the grass?



I do know that it was fun, kind of hard and definitely completely unexpected.

Kookaburra was buzzed when he saw all that I did and had been excited before this . He'd been with me when I shopped for art supplies. So in our homeschool this week ,we took to the park so he could get a chance to learn from my new skills.






Kookaburra used an ink water wash for his background, then he did a charcoal rubbing of his subject and then finally our budding artist applied ink on the tip of a bendy twig and painted his lovely palm tree. Unfortunately we had to leave before he could finish but that's on our 'to do' list over the weekend. So far it looks great :)

Kookaburra loves art. I wonder where he gets that from :)

So what does Kangaroo do when he doesn't want to join in with the art stuff?



Climb a tree of course :)

A parting wish from me to you, try this 'out of the box' art. It was truly liberating after years of not truly appreciating gallery offerings beyond 'as the eye sees it' contributions.