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Annual Art Retreat

Annual Art Retreat

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In my last post, I showed you how I was creating some mark making tools for our annual art retreat. We had the retreat and had so much fun creating abstract artworks. I apologize for the poor quality of the photos as the light is very bad at the lodge where we stay and I was in a bit of a hurry.

The process involved each of us starting with the same size piece of painter’s canvas and then ‘changing’ the canvas with a variety of media and techniques. Some of the steps were timed and some not. It took us nearly a full day to ‘complete’ our pieces. Some of us are still working on them, some may tear them up to use in a different way and other’s may keep the end result as is.

Here are some of the supplies that we used and you can see the piece of folded canvas at the front of the table.

We did construct a few more mark making tools, mine are on the left, Paula’s in the middle and Louise’s gelli printed feather brush is on the right.

I thought it would be interesting to see the pieces as they progressed so I will show each person’s piece separately.

This is Deb’s piece from start to finish.

Here is Louise’s piece. I think she is still working on it.

Here is Paula’s piece. You can see the light shining through the picnic table in these photos. We usually forget that the picnic tables have spaces in between and this always causes issues with such things as printing or marking over the surface. I think Paula is planning on cutting/tearing this into smaller pieces to use in some manner.

And here’s Sally’s. You can’t see this in the last photo but she has added hand stitching and beading. She was not sure if she is finished with it or not.

And lastly, this one is mine. I think I am finished with it and actually happy with the result. Usually, I don’t tend to like my attempts at abstraction. I didn’t add much color so maybe that’s why I like this one better.

We had a great time and I am always amazed at the different styles that come from each person. We know each other well enough that it would be easy to recognize who’s piece is whose.

3rd Quarter Challenge Finished Pieces

3rd Quarter Challenge Finished Pieces

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I worked on my mixed media pieces for Karen’s 3rd Quarter Challenge this week. The first piece I worked on was the smaller board with lots of folded and creased scrim on. I started by painting the background with some blue shades of acrylic paint.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThen I layered lots of shades of blue and white, then finished with some details of black, white, yellow and red. This is the piece just after I finished, while it was still wet.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd this is it when it is dried. You can’t really see the texture in the photo, but I’ve uploaded it to flickr, so you can see the texture of the scrim and the detail better.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAHere’s a supermacro of a small part which does show some of the texture.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOften when I work with acrylics, I need to wipe off excess paint, so I keep a spare painting board nearby to wipe the paint on there. It makes a great base for another painting. This isn’t really part of the challenge, but I painted it just after the blue piece. It’s mostly the same colours, but in different amounts.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd a supermacro:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe second piece I worked on was the larger board with 2 layers of scrim. It did turn out the way I’d planned, but didn’t look as good as I’d imagined. I painted a light grey in the centre and dark greys around the edges. Then I covered some laser prints of artwork in Golden gel medium and stuck them face down on the surface. When they were dried the next morning, I wet them and carefully rubbed off the backing paper to reveal the prints. I covered in gel medium then painted reds, oranges, yellows and whites around the edges. I don’t think I got enough paper off the bottom print. I might carry on working on this, I think it needs something else.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASorry, Kaz, I couldn’t think of a way to add metal, there’s a little bit of silver acrylic paint on the blue one, though 🙂  Has anyone else made anything for the challenge?

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