Art in the Forest #4 & #5

This is no good – I’m only averaging one blog a month this year, so here's an extra long one!  The last two Art in the Forest workshops have been about exploring colour – firstly with pastels and then with paint (gouache and acrylic). The preceding sessions have been about shape, line and pattern in various mediums but generally monochromatic, and mostly black & white. So these later sessions produced a riot of colour as we dabbled with messy pastels and the mysteries of the colour wheel. Many in the group hadn’t used pastel before, so we experimented with different types (hard and soft, bargain and professional) as well as different types of paper.

Another get to know one another with some speedy portraits was a great way to give everyone a chance to try out everything.

We then moved on to some serious sheep drawing and some fabulous results.

Janys loved her new medium so much, she went home, drew a lovely portrait of some horses and sold it on the spot!

But not everyone liked the mess and was definitely not converted to pastels.

The following week we entered more comfortable territory for some, water soluble paint. But we challenged ourselves to think about how we see and select pigment by using a colour wheel. 

 

Firstly painting with only the 3 primary colours, then 6 colours (primary and secondary) and then all 12 colours of the wheel (primary, secondary and tertiary). 

A riot of fabulous colour (out of shot - 7 tired students and a lot of washing up)

Bog Art

There has been another Art in the Forest workshop since my last blog post – but I will save that till next time. I really want to show you what I’ve been up to these last few days. Having taught myself how to use the Adobe Design Suite, a session creating a digital image can vary from exasperating to very satisfying. I can’t always remember how to do it, and sometimes the computer just says “no” and we fall out. This week all went well. I drew the wellies of a dutch man standing on 3000 years of peat and the bright sticky face of a sundew. The I just converted these into digital images using Adobe Illustrator. This means they can be blown up to enormous proportions without becoming all pixelated (by the word“just” I mean -  spent 2 days hunched over the laptop). “Why?  I hear you ask. Well, once printed, kiddies will be able to measure their height in peat age and then throw soft velcro coated fly-like objects at the sticky bits of the sundew. Why else?

The sticky sundew - aim, fire!

A 3m high roller banner 

Art in the Forest no. 2 & 3

Another two workshops have been and gone. A full house today for some lino cutting after snow, toothache and broozed ribs got in the way of fun for some the week before. We started off each workshop with a little more drawing looking for line and shapes to represent form and light and produce a pleasing pattern. We moved away from vegetables and used a selection of photos as reference material. Princess Neptune made an appearance in indian ink, as did Dennis and a few other familiar characters. During the lino session we revisited some of our earlier studies and developed them a stage further into a more graphic, monotone composition.

A little Dennis shaped demo

The lino cuts themselves were as lovely as the prints taken from them

More of our work and sources of inspiration on Pinterest (when I get 5 mins to upload them!)