Once in a Blue Horse

I signed up for Strathmore's free online art workshops and first up is Traci Bautista with her offering of "Doodles Unleashed". I have admired Traci's art in magazines for some time, but never have taken a workshop from her. I have been enjoying watching the video which is organized, professional, well thought out. The only minor criticism is the audio fades in and out in places. But it is colourful, fun, inspiring, and gets me motivated to grab my supplies and play. Yahoo! I used some of her suggestions to create this spread in my journal. I already had the outline of the horse and was especially inspired by Traci's freedom to create by asking us to think of our approach as doodling with paint. I found this made it more fun and made me less inhibited with my paint brush. Cool! I love it when that happens.

My red paint swirls became birds as I further doodled little faces, beaks, plumes and feet. Then the horse seemed to boring so more doodling there too. Then I finished it off with some rubber word stamps.

And here is a detail of the horse.

I got so excited I only used a portion of Traci's techniques and I am looking forward to trying out some more. Check out Traci's "Doodles Unleashed" for an injection of inspiration. :) Only the first of the four lessons is posted so far.

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy new year

Journal Pages

This character is very inspired by Lynne Hoppe's art. Did the pencil sketch on the bus to work and the watercolour at home.

The Mad Hatter

watercolours, pastel and fibers.

Strathmore journal cover

Cool Dude

I sketched the orange on coffee break at the office.

"The Celtic Goddess" on clayboard

Carved the clayboard then used watercolours, a celtic stamp, then beeswax.

The cover of my new medium Strathmore watercolour journal.

"FACES" done in acrylics and walnut ink.

Spring is in the air

done in pencil and watercolours

Lessons from Pam

This is after Lesson 4

This is after Lesson 3

Visual Journals

I signed up for a free journal class sponsored by Strathmore, featuring their new line of journals with four different options for paper and at a very reasonable price. This is me playing around with the Watercolour one and the Mixed media one as well. I'll write more tomorrow to tell you what I did but for now here are the pictures. :) enjoy!

Oh Mr Fig Newton is in a different journal.