I wasn’t going to join in this challenge. I thought I would give it a miss this time. I have enjoyed doing the Inches Challenges but for some reason I didn’t feel drawn to this. And then, after I saw a few people posting their work in the Mindful Art Facebook group I decided that I did want to do it. I am so glad I did.
There was a warm up video to get our creative juices flowing. I used small pieces of watercolour paper in varying sizes. Most were 2″ x 3″ but some were bigger. And some were the off cuts which produced slim pieces. I wasn’t thrilled with all my practice pieces, but put the best ones in my book.
On each of the 5 days we were given a prompt that we could take whichever way we wanted. Wishy washy was just shapes using water colour shapes. I wasn’t particularly impressed with what I’d done. But I suppose recognising that is part of the learning process. They would have been so much better with some outlining or detail in pen.
Day 2 was Layering. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I used some of the practise pieces that hadn’t made it to the previous pages plus some other things in my stash that I added colour to. I don’t normally enjoy covering up parts of my work, especially if I like the pattern. However, I have to admit that the end result is much better for the layering. The top layer of small leaves on thin stems was done on tracing paper which gives a lovely effect.
On day 3 we were encouraged to take a design and reimagine it, doing it in different ways. So I had a square with 3 small designs and repeated them several times using different size brushes and colours. I wish I had chosen something else to work on. I don’t like the results I got.
The instruction for day 4 was simple. Take the letter X and combine it with another pattern. All but the top left were created by adding to cards I already had in my stash or from the practise pieces. My favourite is the top left where I had the idea of doing the Greek letter Chi. My next favourite is the one top right which was one of the practice pieces.
The final day took me three days to complete. The instruction was to take a pattern and scale it up and/or down. I took the leaf because it was one of my favourites and set to work. I did most of the work on the squares on the left hand page. On Saturday afternoon I went to an art fair at Shepherd’s Dene retreat house. I was on my way out when I saw some autumn leaves. Resistance was futile….. I did try hard not to pick them up, but to no avail.
I covered the leaves with pva glue but should have pressed them before hand. They refused to lie flat to be glued onto the paper. I also had a failed attempt at using them to make prints. But I do now have A3 and A4 pieces of watercolour paper with lovely green and yellow inks that I will use another day for another project. In the end I blew the dregs of the ink, with some water added, over two A4 pieces of card joined to create an A3 card. When it was dry the leaves refused to stick down so I got my sewing machine out and had great fun creating a trail of stitches to hold them in place. On reflection, I should have used white thread so that it looked like a slug trail. It would also have been improved if I had added a second colour onto the background. I had put 3 of the leaves on one side thinking I might do something with them in my prayer journal. But instead I thought they could go on the page opposite the drawings, as you can see.
Elizabeth Jones' Diary 