Sketchbook Revival 2025-A Garden, a Street, and Some One-Liners

 It's been a few days since I posted, but I've been busy! Still learning and trying new lessons and loving it!

First I grew a mixed media mark making garden in a concertina book with Helen Stamper in her class "How Wild is Your Garden?" A concertina book is made like an accordion, and it can stand alone on its edge when it's opened, or it folds up to look like a book. I only made a small sample to remind me how to do it and glued it into my sketchbook on the backside. You can also make art on both sides if you want to. I used charcoal, oil pastel, posca pens, crayons, colored pencils, sticks, my Zig marker, anything and everything layered over to look like a tangled overgrown garden. I want to do a large one in black and white, and also one in color. Once I got started, I had a blast!

This is another very fun class with Karen Stamper called "Collage The Street", also in my small sketch book. I so want to make a large tall one like she did in her demo. The nosy woman in the window and the dog on the porch are two of my original sketches, which I printed off as thumbnails. Collage and sketching are so fun together. Great workout for my imagination, as most of these classes are!

Another fun class with Carla Sonheim called "One Liner Drawings", in which we took our pencil and drew things from her prompts using only one line to draw the whole thing, like a child. Her prompts were cat, elephant, flowers in vases, and toilets (commodes). I just added the swan-ducks. I did three pages in my small sketchbook, then I had had so much fun I sketched a bunch more in my large book!

After sketching several of each prompt, we picked one idea to re-draw and color (I used colored pencils). Then we picked another idea to collage and color, so I used a piece of text for the swan face and a piece of brown paper bag with asemic writing on it for the wing and colored in in with watercolor and a Posca pen. I also used colored pencils to color one of the elephants just as it was, plus some glasses.

I forgot to make a photo of the sketches before I made paint blobs between them to pull images out of. It also used up leftover paint and cleaned off my brush.

I just finished another class today, watercolor, but decided to put it in the next post. About to watch a new class!

We went out of town the last couple of days, so I didn't get much done. Today, I picked out and ordered a new laptop. The one I have is fine, but it doesn't have enough room for the new Windows 11, and after October 14 they won't do free updates for security for Windows 10. At least, that's what I understand from the messages Microsoft has been sending me. I'm glad I can get a new one, but I dread setting it up and learning how to use it. I'm getting too old for this technical stuff and have nobody to help me. Maybe I'll get through it ok. We'll see.

Anyway, it's really hot in Tennessee right now, so I'm really thankful for air conditioning!

Prayers for all the flood victims in Texas, and that they find all those missing people and pets. Such an awful thing to happen, and it can happen anywhere anytime to any of us.

Take care, be kind, and stay creative!