Wanderlust January Challenge

I thought I would take part in the January Challenge over at Wanderlust. (See side bar). The challenge was to look out your window and pick three colours (plus B & W), and use them to creatively describe January. Naturally, most of the entries, from the northern hemisphere involve Winter cold and snow and longing for Spring. Not so here down under! January (and now February), have brought nothing but extreme heat and humidity. Ah well, it is Summer, so it's to be expected, right? Yes, it is, but the heat has been of genuine heatwave proportions, with many days up around 47 C (118 F) and the major topic of conversation. Bring on Autumn.

So, my colours were bright blue, green and yellow. The sky really is that colour, and there's plenty of trees everywhere I look, but they are all a drab olive green at the moment. Ok, I don't actually see anything that's yellow, except sand at the beach (and I was there very recently), but there is something in the atmosphere which just feels yellow, (maybe it's the idea of the sun being portrayed as such, I don't know), but I just felt compelled to go with this feeling. Over everything though, is a "heat haze" phenomenon, which is actually visible. (It's most obvious where the horizon meets the sea and I've seen this quite often recently.) 

I slipped in a tiny bit of pink representing the only tree nearby (crepe myrtle), that I can see that's in flower at the moment. Very pretty! There's the odd wisp of clouds but they don't amount to much, (No rain, that is ... unfortunately.)

More info : acrylic paints on 300gsm watercolour paper, water soluble graphite pencil. 

Oh, and BTW, I'd rather draw faces than trees, and I'm not much good at faces, so these trees, or suggestions of trees, I should say, really stretched my artistic ability :)

Wanderlust 2017 "Focus"

The first lesson for Wanderlust 2017 (see side bar), was about "making a statement", something to keep in mind for our creative (and other?) endeavours for the year. Many have chosen themes such as "be brave" and "adventure" and similar. This doesn't quite work for me. Being brave suggests facing hazards or dangers or the unknown. I suppose a year long course could be considered an adventure. It just seems a bit vague and that could be the problem. Some serious ideas, which seemed appropriate, came to mind ... much concentration, patience and perseverance is required (on my part). However, I think this can all be distilled into one simple word ... focus.

Using just a few supplies, acrylics, gesso, stencil and images (my photos) ...

It was suggested that the images could be your favourite places. And they are. (From the coast to the mountains.)

Recycled Oversprays ...

... turned into journals! The last guest tutorial over at Wanderlust was by Joanna Grant who had some great ideas about recycling various types of paper and card. So much inspiration that I just had to dive into my collection of A3 papers which I have used for a long time now as backing sheets when I use various sprays (mainly Glimmermist, because I can't resist those sparkly colours!) I just keep turning them around and catching more overspray. It doesn't matter what colours I'm using. Often these waste papers look better than whatever I was actually making :) Anyway, I finally got to put them to good use, along with a collection of smaller "shaving cream" backgrounds which were all experimental at the time and naturally, I just filed them away, with no purpose in mind.

Anyway, here's a few lot of pics ...  enjoy ...

That's the larger journal above. The pages keep folding out, getting smaller as you go.
There's about 22 pages in all.

The little journal (above) started out with the intention of being an accordion-fold booklet, but I just had to put a cover on it, didn't I? The closure is made from lingerie elastic, in case you wondered :)  And the pages are connected using ...

... washi tape, (Scotch) tape, and a "silk" tape 

(from the first aid section of the el cheapo shop!)

Autumn in a southern Spring

Over at Wanderlust the challenge for September is to use a particular set of four colours, inspired by a European Autumn  ...

There's no particular theme. Just use these colours, plus black and white, if required. Well, I like this sort of challenge and at first it seemed that Autumn was an obvious choice of theme ... but, it is Spring here and I don't want to wish away the next six months thinking about next Autumn. So, I've got all those colours down and I'm happy with the result. 

I added some serviette pieces which amazingly were exactly the right colours.

I'm not sure where it's going now. Any ideas?

Details: double page spread in journal, acrylic paint with lots of "non-Artist" tools

 to make all those markings, torn paper serviette pieces added