Wanderlust 2022 - weeks fifteen to twenty-one - Artists' acrylics

The art journaling course continues and I am learning a lot about the different media.  This block was about artists' acrylics, which are highly pigmented, generally consistent with colours throughout different ranges and heavier bodied. We began by colour mixing with a limited palette and then focusing on a female artist who was overlooked during their lifetime (there are many to choose from!) I chose Camille Claudel, a pupil, muse and lover of the sculptor Rodin.  She had a terrible life, Rodin leaving her, her father dying, she had a breakdown and then her brother had her committed to an asylum for the remaining thirty years of her life.  She wrote to him to ask him to get her released, but he didn't.  She now has a museum in France dedicated to her work.  We had to paint three quick portraits of our chosen artist, choose the one we liked best and work on it, then create a page. 

Week sixteen where we created a gel plate printed book and made a stamp using foam letters which we incorporated into the pages in several places. We also made collage paper to add to the pages.

My stamp was 'enjoy the moment' and my book ended up being really grungy! 

Portraits for week seventeen was not a week I was particularly looking forward to as I find faces difficult.  However, we were given a step by step lesson and encouraged to use a 'Posterise' app or Photoshop effect to show the different areas of light, medium and dark.  While we were encouraged to use a self portrait, there was no way I was going to do that, so instead, I chose a face from a royalty free photo site.  It is probably the best portrait I have painted and I did enjoy painting it, but not an area I particularly want to explore. However, it is good to know that I am slightly better at it than I thought.  The paper we wiped our brushes on became part of the portrait, which was a nice touch.

I much preferred week eighteen where we layered colours with white or black.  My patterns went rather curvy and organic, but I went with it!

I loved week nineteen where we chose a song and added words and images. My song was 'Walking on Sunshine', a really happy song by Katrina and the Waves from the 1980s. 

We were encouraged to make a second page where we created a collage on the left and wrote out some of the song's lyrics on the right. This time, it was 'What a difference a Day makes' by Dinah Washington.

Week twenty was all about the layers - creating a patchwork of collage and adding acrylics to bring some of the pieces out and fade others into the background.  It took quite a while to build up as we had to let layers dry.  We were encouraged to add words and I wasn't going to, but noticed I had stuck a piece of collage paper with writing which said 'we watched the clouds...and listened to a lullaby' (it was from a digikit of diary pages) right in the middle off the page (serendipity in action once more), so they became my focal words. 

Abstract botanicals was the focus for week twenty-one, where we layered up petal shapes and knocked them back using layers of translucent acrylic. I added an image of a mushroom gill print which my colleague from work had been making and kindly sent to me for collage.

Again, I learnt a lot about acrylics and how they can be used. The next seven weeks are focusing on Craft acrylics - should be interesting!