Skip to main content

The 31 Days of January - Selected Efforts

The 'Grown-Ups Table' (or GUT as it is fondly called) is Wendy MacNaughton's brainchild on Substack.  As a practicing artist, she led her subscribers through January with daily themed art prompts that included great information about techniques, artists, and art genres among other topics. 

It was a super experience and work too.  Part of participation involved reading others' posts and commenting on as many as you could.  With 700-1,000 posts per day, I'm sure some were missed, but I learned a ton from others.  I saw innovative interpretations of the prompts, learned about what people were intending with their work, and what memories they may have chosen to represent visually -- all sprinkled with some laughs along the way.  Thank you Wendy and the GUT community!

Photos of some of my favorite work that I did (aside from the blind contour drawing posted in January) are below.  The materials I used throughout the month were colored pens and markers plus watercolor on sketchbook paper.  I'm loving how my sketchbook has developed quite a bit of personality as a result!

Drawing some ornaments


A feeling mandala

Taking a hike


Collage of three blind contours

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fabric Basket - Pretty Easy

This basket was made in Jane Hall's half-day course at IQF 2014.  The greatest amount of time involved in making it--was cutting and sewing the strips together.  Otherwise, it went together easily and quickly (3 hours). These baskets are a great holiday gifting idea that you can match to family and friends' home decoration color schemes.  They're fun and useful besides.

Highjacked Blog Photo

My profile photo was highjacked ! For those of you who are blogging, be wary. There are some unscrupulous folks out there who may be using or about to use a photo(s) you've uploaded to an online photo-hosting site. At the time I created a blog, having a URL for a photo uploaded online was the only way to insert a photo in your profile or to create a custom header. There had been no problems for a long while. This morning, however, I did a Google image search for my name and found my photo linked to a totally different blog than my own! It is possible I didn't mark my file with the online photo-hosting site as private, but I didn't expect this to happen. I don't know whether marking it private would have actually averted the situation, but I'm not waiting to find out. I eliminated my membership to that online photo-hosting service today and caution anyone to be careful with uploading images to the internet . If you read the terms of agreement at many sites, you'...

Zine Selections - Fun with Copy Paper

Creating zines is one of my ways of 'stealing' a great idea...from Austin Kleon, author of the book titled 'Steal Like an Artist'.  As he would say, imitation is flattery, and I certainly got the zine bug from him (that he, in turn, got from someone else)! Those pictured below are examples of the zines I've made from white copy paper...yes, the kind you buy in reams at the office supply store.  Some are theme-related (e.g. 5 Senses, Reconnection), others are book notes (e.g. about Jo Van-Gogh Bonger and her role in Vincent's rise to art fame), still others are inward-looking (The Wintering of Seeds, Goals, etc.).  The sky's the limit.  They can be anything you can imagine!   I really enjoy making zines including the internet research I may do about particular subjects.  But zines don't have to take long to make, and absolutely no research is needed to create one.  Plus they make clever gifts for holidays or as thoughtful messages of 'I'm thinking...