The Shapes of Spring

I'm inspired today at the feeling of Spring coming and Winter departing, and thought I'd work it into our mini-challenge relating to our weekly theme of shapes in art.

If it is still cold and miserable wherever you may be, perhaps looking at a glimpse of Spring might make you feel better for the time you are making art today. Making art always makes me feel better about EVERYTHING, so it especially works when I'm cold and stuck inside. But today, as I look outside my window at my lemon tree, heavy with fruit, and fuschia colored azaleas covering my bushes, I am really into the idea of Spring- and flowers!

Two well-loved artists used flowers a great deal in their work, and both really exploited the boldness of color -and especially shape- of flowers. Of course, I am talking about Georgia O'Keefe, with her larger-than-life contemporary flower portraits and their wonderful shapes, and Vincent Van Gogh, with his crazy-beautiful views of irises and sunflowers. Who could look at the flowers painted by either of these artists and not feel something wonderful? (Well, I may be a bit biased, as these have been two of my favorite artists since I was a young girl, but just go along with my bias for this little post...)

Here is a simple quote I found by Ms. O'Keefe, that I thought related to the topic today"

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.

See! Georgia (may I call her Georgia?) knew the power of shapes, and you can follow her lead and be inspired to do the same today with your art.

Above and below, you will find two of my photos of flowers that you can work with today in your drawings or paintings. Look for the positive and negative space and how you can make the composition interesting by exploiting it. Look for the repetition of shapes in the petals. If you are reading this post for the first time today, look back to the other posts this week for additional posts relating to this one. We have spent our entire week focusing on shapes in art and how to use them to make our work stronger, with individual lessons and focus on how to do it. (Tomorrow starts a new weekly theme!)

Here are some links to flower paintings done by Van Gogh and O'Keefe (See Bella Donna, 1939) for you to take a look at, and inspire you.

Get drawing or painting, and have fun today working with the shapes of Spring!

Do it Upside-Down!

OK- Get your mind outta there, 'cause I'm just talking about looking at art differently- upside down and even sideways to get a different view of the shapes that make up your subject.

Of course, the best known person for teaching this technique is Betty Edwards, who discovered this method while teaching one of her drawing classes, and who has written the well-known and excellent book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

In a nutshell, by turning a reference photo or a copy of an old master drawing upside-down, it is easier to replicate it, because we do not draw what we "know." We, instead, actually draw what we see. The example that sticks with me the most is one that she writes about in her book, where new artists tend to draw a bucket with a circle at the top (for the hole) and a flat bottom. This is because they know that the bucket is completely round at the actual opening, and that the bottom sits flat on the ground. They can't yet look at it and take the time to push the logic away, that when viewed from the side and looking down a bit on the bucket, it has an oval opening and a curved line at the base. This is really basic, but it is the beginning of learning to see.

For a complicated picture- a face where I want the likeness to really be close, or for a scene that has a lot of shapes that need to come together in a pretty exacting way, looking at the picture upside down or sideways can help you get something corrected that may look off when you are drawing and just can't figure out what the problem is.

I also use this method to help me figure out what I can bring out and accentuate in a painting. I can see certain things when I look at the scene straight ahead, but if I snap a few pictures for reference, and then use them in my studio to view upside-down or sideways, it helps me look at the scene in a new way.

Below, I will share one of my photos, taken in Laurel Grove Cemetary in Savannah, Georgia. Use it as you wish to interpret for your own art.

Notice how the shapes seem to delineate better, when viewing the photo upside down. Our brains stop trying so hard to understand the picture and can just look at it in terms of shapes, lights and darks- a much easier task to replicate and interpret for our art.

I hope that you will share your work and think about leaving a comment! I just created a yahoo group for this blog, and will soon be uploading the button for a direct link there. It will be easier for you to share your related work.

Collage In Your Sketchbook

The mini-challenge for today is to think about incorporating collage elements into your sketchbook.

Collage can be an art form in and of itself, so you could include an entire page devoted to collage, but in the example above, you will see how I added a few collaged pieces of patterned tissue to a drawing I had done in one of my Moleskine sketchbooks. When I finished the original sketches (notice frames were used, like we talked about yesterday), the page looked really bland and uninviting, so a few days later, I went back to the page and used white glue and tissue to add the bits of color and design elements. In this case, the collage helped save a totally dull page and helped make it better.

Another idea for collage is to pick up a few "finds" as you go through your day- receipts, a coffee stirrer, a dime you find in a parking lot, a business card or tickets... and make a collage with these items. It might be fun to use text too, to talk about what you were doing when you found the items. Be imaginative! Collage can be a fun alternative technique to drawing and painting in your sketchbook.

Share your work and experiences by leaving a comment!

Art Journal Update

I went ahead and did the Art and Letters challenge (see previous post), so that I could talk about the attitude toward the process while I was working on it.

First, let me say, that there were quite a few times I hated what I came up with, and other moments where I liked it very much. I feel pretty sure that a lot of you might vacillate between the love/hate relationship with your work as well. Am I right?

Anyway, I took a few shots along the way to give you an idea of how this progressed. The finished two-page spread in my Moleskine Sketchbook (shown above) took about 50 minutes. The graphite drawing (shown below with other pics) was done in 10 minutes, the first wash 10 more, adding watercolor pencil about 15 minutes, adding more watercolor pencil (dry this time) 10 more, and the last 5 minutes were spent journaling.

I ran up against some stumbling blocks- the paper got too wet from the washes, and I even made a hole in the page near the coffee cup, but my attitude is just that anything I do can be fixed or covered up. It is not a big deal. Here are some of the other pictures of the work-in-progress: