Better late than never....

Recently, I spent a fabulous weekend at my fave place to learn all things arty, with international artist Dina Wakley

And being in the company of our good old Yorkshire home grown international artist Dyan Reaveley also made the weekend for me.... fun and laughter all round!

...they are a bit of a comedy double act!

Kate, Sarah and lovely Jude...

Emma and Ali ...

That was Day one - I got so absorbed after this, the camera was forgotten. We learned how to draw birds (the easy way with the use of tracing paper!) and paint them, feathers and all ...day two was making a mini book depicting where we have come from, where we are now and where we are heading and then binding it altogether using a Coptic stitch method. (sorry, no photo's as I'd left the camera in my other handbag! Mine isn't quite finished but I may post it here when its done) But my favourite day was day three....entitled "Intuitive Art"

We had tutorials in stages.... scribble???!!!!

....brush over the scribble lines with water....

choose colour, paint in between your scribble..... don't forget the shading.... we also removed paint by rubbing with water through stencils and added texture using modelling paste pushed through stencils...

...you will end up with something like this....

Then Dina held up our work one by one and we all said what "saw" it was quite amazing really - we all "saw" different things, people, people riding a bike, fish, windows, doors....

.... so the next stage was to "force" what you saw - go over the areas you wanted to keep, making the "person" "fish" "window" or whatever it was you "saw" then block out the surrounding area with colour and paint in as desired.... here is Dina's finished interpretation of what she "saw" - herself, with a basket full of balls - and some of them were up in the air...

So here is how I started.. scribble...

Once it was painted in - no photo of that stage! and my work was held up, Bezzie Su said it was like someone was praying over me... which is quite appropriate for me, I went with that theme and I've called it "The Blessing" My soon-to-be Vicar husband is praying over me... this is my nearly finished version....

We went on to use the same process to make a book which I LOVE.... I will post that next time... don't want to overload you all :D