I can't believe we've gone through another 5 weeks of prompts! From here on out we'll be going back to the 2 prompts per month format so we can ease into the final quarter of the year. We have a quick break and our next prompt will be sent out Friday, Sept. 6th. In the meantime you can catch up on prompts, try more ideas or expand on the techniques you've tried and liked. (My goal for this week is to finish a self portrait for this year!) Below is a look at what we've been making lately!

“This prompt was TEXTURE. In this simple practice I was trying to use only Qtips and paper towel for strokes and shapes. This was easy and fun but probably should try this approach with something more complicated.” - KAREN

"The almost finished evergreen for ACTION. I use a watercolor smudge technique I found in Olivia’s newsletter. It was fun and added more movement. Will use this technique again.

 

An older prompt was WUNDERLUST. For this ambitious for me work in progress, I painted a light warm wash over the page then drew a variety of flowers I saw at the local botanical garden with watercolor pencils. I’m just starting to color it all in. I’m curious if I’m going to like the end result!" - KAREN

"This prompt was Watercolor. My fav. Thanks for all the great ideas. This example was using watercolor with pallet knife, a kind of intuitive landscape I’ve never tried before. I put dots of tube watercolor on the knife then dragged the knife across a wet page. Really loved this exercise and want to do more but it left my hand and arm sore, lol. See I love watercolor bc I’m a Pisces, of course, but also bc it’s gentle. I have a chronic pain condition that makes my arms and legs sore especially with respective movements. Using the pallet knife was too much for me. I love the intuitive nature of this exercise but won’t be doing it often." - KAREN

Last time I shared my work in progress watercolor page and I finally finished it! The backgrounds are using the same colors, one very watered down and the other not. I decided to add a quote in cursive about softness to the top and a quote in print about being bold to the bottom. The white gel pen with the light colored background was maybe too light, but I also kind of like that you have to look closer to see the text. “What's soft is strong.” - Laozi and “Fortune befriends the bold.” - Helen Keller

I ended up continuing to use words and was inspired by this quote for distortion:

“Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.” - Henri Matisse

Even though he said this many years ago it still rings true if not more with the invention of social media and AI generated images.

 

I wanted to show messiness (how things really are) contrasted by something very neat (what is presented / what we see that might not be true). 

 

I started off with a distorted brush and writing the quote with blue paint. My thought was to use transparent paper and an origami technique to make the neat part and lay it over the blue writing. But it didn't really work out because the transparent paper was too light! I ended up adding a black background and adding the quote to that as well. 

 

Although it didn't turn out how I had initially imagined, I think it still represents what I was trying to express--and I really loved making this origami fold. It's so easy but looks really cool to me! (Fold a rectangle in half, cut a downwards line starting from the fold, open it up--the cuts should look like mountains, then fold down every other strip.) 

It's easy to sometimes get stuck in the brainstorming phase--this is something that happens to me or even mid-piece and I have to think things through. It's OK to take time to do that so you can complete it, at the same time don't let that stop you! Sometimes taking some action is the best way to unblock or finish a piece :)

I hope you find moments to create and rest and I will talk to you soon! (And keep on sharing your pages, I will include them in the next check in!)