The Last Few Days Art Melange'

 I'm a bit behind on my posting, but these are some "just for fun" pieces that I did before, and during the beginning, of doing the Mastering Mixed Media Challenge with Tamara Laporte during the first two weeks of May. Class photos of work and more about that in a later post. 

All but the girls' faces at the end are in my Winsor Newton 7"x10" 135 lb mixed media sketchbook. The girls are on some random drawing and mixed media papers.

I saw a gorgeous OLD oak tree on a television show that had branches similar to these, and I remarked to hubby how we would have loved to have had one of those in the yard when we were growing up, to climb and play among the branches. The next day I took a brush with sumi ink and tried to re-create it from memory. I liked it in black and white, but decided to add a watercolor background, which I should have done first. Anyway, it was way too bright, so I tried to tone it down by taking some off and adding colored pencils. I also took some of the ink off of the tree to make it more three dimensional, and added more colored pencil marks to it. I should have planned it out better before I started, but it's more fun to just go for it! I'm ok with it...

This abstract is very loosely based on a couple of classes in the Mastering Mixed Media Challenge classes. I collaged three or four pieces from some of my gelli plate prints onto the page, painted some black acrylic paint onto my mini gelli plate and stamped it onto the page randomly, then scribbled on it with a stick and sumi ink (because I couldn't find my India ink). The center stamp reminds me of an old dark barn stable, and I'm just now noticing an eye in the bottom corner one...

This is the second one I did inspired by Toni Burt's class in the MMM classes, only instead of a face drawing in her style, I used one of mine from a Sketchbook Revival class before, and added pieces of paper torn from my gelli plate prints and more stamping with black acrylic paint on my mini gelli plate. I finished it off with a stick and sumi ink frame. I call her "Poker Face". I love her!

Experiments with watercolors, regular and sea salt on damp paper...

More experimenting with watercolor and salt...

Another experiment with sumi ink, watercolor, and regular and sea salts...

I really had fun with this one! I printed out some of my old squiggle girl, and cat, sketches to use in this mixed media page. I started off with a paper that I had cleaned my brushes off on, added some newspaper that I had printed off my photo of trees with a bird nest, a piece of tracing paper, another piece of newsprint, the tag from a teabag, some extensions of branches with my Zig marker, sumi ink, and Micron pens, a bit of colored pencil, and probably something else that I've forgotten...

These are just faces that I practiced in Toni Burt's style, from her class in MMM challenge, on random sheets of scrap paper. I used a Stabilo pencil with a bit of water on the top two and a regular pencil on the bottom three. They might show up in some later projects! My class project is coming up in a later post.

I'm only doing a handful of the many classes in the MMM challenge, and I've done two of the projects twice now, but I have about four other projects, that I've watched the videos and took notes on, to do, so I'm saving them to share in one post later. It may be a few days!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking at my art trials. Thank you for visiting, and I hope to see you in the next post! Keep making things. It's good for you!