My Art Workshop

I never tried this before. This image looks like watercolors but it’s actually colors from flowers and berries I collected in my garden yesterday and left to steep in water overnight.

Some of the colors came from carrots (the sun), redcurrant gave the very vibrant pink, which turned out to be so dominant, I could paint it on top of any other color, and it would take over. I also used lavenders that gave a rich brown and granny’s bonnet gave me a soft bright grassy green. It soon faded to more of a yellow though.

It was a challenge to find a blue color or at least blueish.
The revelation came when I mixed blackcurrant and dogwood on the paper, and to my huge surprise watched how the olive green dogwood and the deep purple blackcurrant shifted into the most amazing minty blue-green.
Experimenting a bit more I was able to get a range of blue and green colors with that mix.

Most colors were very soft and weak, since they were very diluted. A few of them I boiled to try strengthen them, but it came with a price of the color turning brownish. It worked fine with lavenders, less fine with the soft pink I got from rose petals.

I never thought I would be able to find a range of colors in my garden at this point with the drought and all, to actually be able to paint a decent rain-forest, which was today’s theme on SketchDaily.

But it turned out that dried out and very sad blackcurrant berries works just as fine as ripe and delicious ones for this purpose. I had cut down the very dried out lavender flowers, and tossed them in a garbage pile, still the petals worked fine extracting color from. And the rose petals were from roses way past their pretty bloom.

This picture took layers and layers to finish. In the end I added a bit of black and white ink to add details to it all.

I am not entirely sure this fits under my creative challenge, but today I’ll share about my experience with baking my own rugbrød (Danish rhye breads). Thanks to Kristina Hobbs who shared on her blog exactly how she made her own sourdough and rugbrød. It looked really simple so I decided I’d try my luck with this too.

I started the project last Tuesday so by now it has been almost a week underway. Sourdough has been bubbling away happily on my kitchen table for days. Every day it was fed water and flour. A scent of yeast and fermentation was quickly spreading in the kitchen. Finally last night the sourdough was ready to bake.

This evening we had half of one of the breads for dinner. It had turned out really delicious.

I had left the hard ends on the kitchen table after I had cut up the breads. But family apparently liked it so much, that later when I went to the kitchen, all those scraps had mysteriously disappeared. 🙂

Today’s submission for February in Colors. I met a group of interesting Danish artists. Being part of a group, working on and sharing a creative process, is very inspiring.

Getting a finished piece done each day is a challenge. Especially as the days progress, I realized I needed some sort of routine and a specific style to stick to for this series.

The style I settled on is a mix of water color, soft pastels and digital tools and the motives are mostly drawings I do at croquis exercises or anatomy studies. I like what I produced this week.

Larger resolution

Another drawing for “Februar i Farver“. I struggled with this one for a long time. I started it at my drawing class this morning, just sketching the hand and inking it. Then back home I wanted to color it, as I had done with the previous drawings for the challenge. It did not work. As I colored it, it just turned into a weird mix between mud in a puddle and a drawing in some bible for a strange religion. I hated it and I was so close to starting all over, going for another pretty nude lady.

But yesterday I had watched a youtube video with a wise artist. His said that he had never ever given up on a piece of art even having to struggle for long.

So I told myself to not give up on the damn thing. I could not do much about the mud phase though. More color would just muddy it up even worse. Taking off color was impossible at that stage. So I ended up cursing at it and bringing it to my pc to work on it digitally.

Finally at this point I reached a version I am OK with.

I like this challenge style I decided upon yesterday. Todays drawing was about the same pipeline as yesterdays:

Play with super quick croquis sketches, watercolor, soft pastels and a final touch up in Photoshop.

The paper nearly broke again but the fact it’s rough and gritty and also so very fragile makes this so much fun! I am used to being so afraid of the clean paper and of making mistakes. But with the past two days drawings, I try to push myself to care less, and it turns out way more fun and creative really.

Today I ended up with a pink girl.

I joined an artist initiative I came across a few days back. A Danish artist Maiken Damsgaard has started what she calls “Februar i farver” (February in Colors). The idea is to submit a creative product each day in February that fits the theme.

Since I need to practise my figure sketching skill and really would like to be doing some croquis I decided to combine things a bit. So my theme for “February in Colors” might be “The Human Body”.

My aunt wrote me a sweet email today and sent me a few drawings she had made in soft pastels. I played with those a few times earlier and it’s always so much fun. So for today I decided to combine super fast figure sketches with soft pastel.

After I had sketched, colored with pastels and added watercolor and ink too, I decided to take a photo of the painting and bring it to Photoshop, to continue playing around a bit with all the digital tools.

This painting definitely had a messy birth but it was also a lot of fun to make.