Blog

My sketches have taken a bit of a back seat this month with all my time and energy going into finishing my bigger paintings. But I've had 'muted colour' on my mind as we've been working our way through various colour exercises at the Tinbeerwah Art Group. So with some paint leftover on my palette I decided to ask myself, what happens if I mute or de-saturate all the colours in a sketch?

"Reconnect Your Drive" I've been getting this error message every time I open up my computer over the past few weeks. It's remarkably persistent with its big red warning triangle and loud pinging notification sounds. At first I just ignored it, then I got a bit frustrated with it. And then the penny dropped.

I spent a wonderful morning with the Oils & Acrylics painting group at Wallace House exploring 'Space' as our Element of Art and 'Focus' as our Principle of Design. We explored positive and negative space and two different ways we can create focal points and areas of emphasis in abstract art, with colour and contrast placement. Check out our album from the morning - I think I may have a few collage converts on my hands!

I'm still adding to my growing collection of colour sketches on paper. I started to see organic shapes in this sketch from the very beginning which informed the way it turned out! A fair bit of colour play without any particular direction in mind beyond starting with blue, pinks and a green.

I had another go at starting with a black background with this little 30 x 30 cm canvas board along with pieces of bright collage paper, some of which had found their way into the early layers of my bigger paintings. Most of the little cutout circles and semi-circles were ones I had lying around, leftover from previous snippings, so I was really just using up what I had to hand.

It doesn't get much more fun than this! My recent 'Outside The Box' workshop at Noosa Arts & Crafts was a fantastic weekend jam packed with colour, experimentation and exploration. We painted, did some gelli printing and collaged our way through 2 days of exploring the notion of thinking and working outside the box - literally!