Art Journal

I have friends who do art journals, so I thought maybe I'd give it a try myself. I don't do it every day, but when something catches my interest, or I want to try something new, I now have a place to play where there is no pressure to succeed. 

I didn't have a proper journal when I started, so I just took a strip of good watercolour paper, and folded it accordion style. This was my first entry. The birds were borrowed from a photograph by Chris Cochems.

When I did get a proper journal, I wasn't sure what the pages cold handle, so I started with a watercolour wash, and then switched to the water soluable pencils. 

Watercolour pencils are fun, and you can take them, and a journal anywhere.  I drew this girl in front of the TV.

Hmmmm.....the scans are showing up things that aren't as obvious in real life.  Oh well, like I said, this is just play.

I've never been very good at drawing freehand, but I took a little webinar recently that had me draw from a grid. I did much better at that.

The journal has other things in it too, like when I got some molding paste, I messed around with it to give texture to an entry. Today I tried my first acrylic transfer. I'm not sure if I succeeded or not, and I'm not sure I'm finished with it.  This Christmas I noticed that several of the envelopes were decorated with various images, so I tore them off and arranged them on a page to make a little collage. 

There is no great art here, but I'm learning lots of new techniques and I'm doing something artistic almost every day now, instead of just once a week.  That's bound to help me progress eventually.

Painting the Naked Truth

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m taking an online webinar on how to paint from photographs. It took me a long time to learn to paint what I saw in photos, though I discovered that even some very good photos don’t translate well into paintings. Now I’m learning how to redesign the photo so it will work better as a painting. I’m told I should just use the photo for inspiration, but not try to copy it. Don’t let it dictate what the painting will look like, the instructor, Johannes Vloothuis says.


Well, I must say that I have learned all kinds of helpful tidbits over the past 11 weeks, and will likely miss sitting in on these lessons after the course is over. Next week is our 12^th and final weekend of classes. I will try to apply as much as I can into my paintings in the future, but right now I’m afraid I just don’t have the skill set to do that.

I was just starting to get some confidence as I had a display at a local church recently and it was well received. People were even asking if I wanted to sell some of the paintings I had there. And then I tried to do some of the recent homework for this webinar, and discovered that while I can reinvent a scene, I cannot produce an even half decent rendering of it with my paints. I need to paint what I see, not what I imagine, or wish was in front of me. Suddenly what I paint looks like something a child would do. My confidence has gone right out the window.

Now, I do remember, when I was trying to switch from decorative arts to fine arts, I had the same problem. But as time went on I got much better, so I suspect this will happen again. I’ll get the hang of it someday, hopefully. But it does remind me that I don’t happen to have one ounce of natural talent.

Nothing Natural About Art

In the old days, when I was in a photography forum for many years, the helpful people there would sometimes give me advise that was impossible to follow. They would try to tell me one of my photos would be better if such and such a thing wasn't in the picture, even if it was something that couldn't be avoided. Or they would suggest it might have been better if I had stepped a couple of feet to the left. In such cases I would have fallen off a cliff, or gone over some waterfall. One thing I like about painting is that I can solve some of these problems with a little artistic license.

Last month I mentioned that I was taking an online course to learn how to turn my photographs into paintings, since I had already learned that even the best photo didn't necessarily translate into a successful painting. We have just finished week 3 of 12 today.

Last week we had homework. We were supposed to post a photograph, both before and after cropping it to demonstrate that we have understood what had been taught so far. Now this was a difficult assignment for me since I generally crop in camera, so I had to really look for something that I had forced me to stand in the wrong place in order to take any picture at all.

I found one that fit the bill because there was water where I would likely have preferred to stand. Then I decided afterwards that it wasn't much of a picture anyway, and I certainly never considered painting it.

So I did the cropping, just to show that I understood the various principals that had been introduced the previous week.

I got rid of the excess sky, and anything else that wasn't necessary. This put the centre of interest in the upper left hand intersection of thirds, which is a good spot for a center of interest to be.

I also fixed it so the lead in grass didn't start in the corner, as that's not a good thing for it to do.

Saturday, during class, the instructor pulled up my photo from among those submitted, and after agreeing with the cropping, as far as I had taken it, proceeded to stick it in his Photoshop and use it to illustrate what would need to be done to the picture to make a decent painting out of it.


Firstly off, I know he doesn't like triangles, so I had already said I would deal with that while painting. He showed us all how, and did it for a totally different reason. My crop had the foreground grasses stopping in the wrong place, he said. They should stop at either 1/3 or 2/3 of the way across the bottom of the picture.

He pushed it back to the 1/3 position.

Oh hey, he told us to crop the picture, but never mentioned we could manipulate it.

He also pointed out that the background trees didn't have a very interesting line. I had already noticed that too, and would have stuck some taller ones in there if I had been inclined to paint it.

Then, of course, he didn't like the metal bridge, with all it's straight lines, and suggested I google for some stone bridge and stick that in the painting instead. Oh, and it would be good if I made it taller, so that it overlapped more of the background.

Oh hey wait, this useless photo might make a decent painting yet. It won't in any way resemble the original scene, but apparently it doesn't have to.

I've just learned that if you want to create art, it's best not to let nature get in the way.