The Simplest Things challenge 2025

I have just finished this little challenge, run by Amy Maricle of Mindful Art Studio.  This little accordion/concertina journal is three inches x three inches (ish). Amy also does the Inchie Challenge, which I have taken part in before, but that is twelve days.

Amy sends an email with a prompt each day for five days and also an example of what she drew for the prompt.  The idea is to do a simple thing - a mark, a line, a dot etc. each of those five days and then continue to draw in a mindful way after the challenge ends. (To this end, Amy has a Slow Drawing lesson every Wednesday and I absolutely love Slow Drawing. Minimal materials and taking your time while drawing for an hour, including a short meditation to calm you down and help you to focus on the drawing.)

So, here's what I did.  These squares are watercolour card and I use a Lamy Safari fountain pen with an extra fine nib and De Attramentis document ink.   This is Closer.

Here's Squiggle, using a brush and watercolour.

Dots is my favourite - simple but effective, using a brush and watercolour again.

Branching using a pen and ink.

Smash, which was suggested by Chris. I was thinking along the lines of smashing watercolour onto a square or smashing the pieces together.  I like this idea better!  All these patterns are simple - just lines or dots. When you start to repeat the lines or dots, they become interesting patterns.

A really simple and fun little challenge.

New watercolours from Rosa Gallery

 I have wanted to upgrade my watercolour paints to better quality for a little while.   Winsor and Newton professional or Daniel Smith are just a bit too much for my budget so I was looking at some reviews and Rosa Gallery paints, made in Ukraine seemed to be a good option.  They are mid range and can also be bought in single pans.  So I bought a 28 set and waited for them to arrive.

I have only swatched them so far, on the card that came with them and in my swatch book.  I can report that they are lovely and creamy, and don't need a lot of water or brush work to activate. My current student grade paints need a fair bit of brush work to get them going.

In my enthusiasm to swatch them, I managed to have two of the same green on the card that came with the paints.  I added the black at the top instead.

Lots of little blocks of colour in my swatch book - it makes me happy!

I particularly like the blues and greens.  I have ordered a few more colours which I think I will need, such as Opera Rose, Cobalt Turquoise and a white, which is useful to have.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Index-Card-A-Day (ICAD) challenge 2021 - Week 6

We're nearing the end of the challenge this year - it finishes at the end of July.  Above clockwise from top left is: Treehouse (magazine collage) ; Oasis (watercolour and ink drawing, inspired by the illustrations in 'The Land of Green Ginger' by Noel Langley - EC, you share my love of this book, I think); Postcard (using up some of my paper stash).  

Clockwise from top left: Nautical (inks and stamps); Train or Train set (inks and stamps); Silver (acrylic paint, stamps and embossing powder; Message in A Bottle (watercolour and stamp).  A bit of a neutrally coloured set this week - apart from Nautical.

On to the last two weeks!

Index-Card-A-Day Challenge (ICAD) 2021 week 2

Here are the ICAD cards for week 2.  Above, top left, Umbrella, Ampersand, bottom right, Library and Ribbon.

 From the top, Fairytale, Dice and Word cloud. As always, some of these are more of a challenge than others.  Some need a lot of thinking about.  What is really good about this challenge is that my huge stash of stamps, stencils, dies, inks, watercolour crayons, paints and other crafting stuff comes into its own.  I am often to be heard saying 'I knew that would come in useful!'

Art Journal 2 (part 2)

 Here's the second instalment from my art journal.  Some pages really took on a life of their own and the one above is a good example.  I needed to add outlines and glitter around the figures and the white dots in the background before I was happy with it.  They are quite enigmatic figures - what are they waiting for?

 This page was just a background for ages.  I loved the colours but couldn't decide what to do with it.  Eventually, I decided to focus on just numbers. Chris and our friend Rachael both looked at it and said 'The Matrix', which is not something I had in mind when making it, but I can see what they mean.

Another reduction painted page, inspired by Niamh Baly on Youtube.

 The page on the left was all about the Tribal cat stamps, which I love.  Orange is not a colour I use much, but this was dictated by a gel print.
The page on the right was inspired by a magazine image, and I used watercolour crayons for the circles of colour in the background.

 On the left is a collage page which started with used teabags to give texture.  I added music paper and some butterflies as more collage papers.  Watered down acrylic and crayons gave the drips of colour.
The page on the right turned out more or less as I imagined in my head and the quote by Henri Matisse, 'There are always flowers for those who want to see them' was the inspiration.

Nearly there, well done if you are still with me.  

This was the most troublesome page in the whole journal and I had painted over it twice previously.  It had been glittery with stars, then was multicoloured with lots of mark making patterns, but I just didn't like it. I was inspired by some rust patterned paper and that became the focus, although you can't see it because it is up at the top, covered by paint.  The original glittery stars were coloured with alcohol inks to blend more with the rust colours.  

Finally, here is possibly my favourite page.  It was inspired by some loose watercolour flowers painted by Creationsceecee.  The stamp is one of my favourites too and a version of this may well be my ATC for May.  I like the bright colours and dots of gold.  The lady has glitter in her hair too.  I would like to revisit this and improve the perspective of the flowers. 

So now to start journal 3.

Nice things - sheep and embossing folders and Brusho Paints

I recently made two sheep for my good (virtual) friend at Elephant's Child who has been a wonderful support to my blog and who had expressed a liking for the needle felted sheep I had made for my craft stall.  I felt that she should have some of her own as a thank you.  They arrived safely with her in Australia and she very kindly featured them on her blog post for today.

 I think they made her smile.  I am going to be making lots more sheep in the coming year!

 I have also been playing with new things, like embossing folders on satin board.  For those not familiar with embossing folders, they are a plastic folder which has a pattern on the inside.  When they are run through a die cutting machine, the pattern is pushed into the paper or card and it looks like my examples above.  The ones I used above are really detailed, but the detail has come through really well.  They will probably be used in card making projects.

 I have also finally got round to playing with my Brusho paints.  These are a highly pigmented form of watercolour paint which come in little pots.  They are in a crystal form, so for my first experiments, I wet the paper and sprinkled a little bit of the colour out - you have to make a hole in the lids and shake the pots.  The crystals immediately spread out and formed rather lovely patterns and colour mixes.  I did find that they stained my fingers a bit so need to be aware of that (the colour did go after a couple of days).  Adding more water helped the colours to blend, but I found I needed to be careful as too much water made them more difficult to control and I started to lose some of the lovely effects.

They can be used as traditional watercolour paints and there are videos on Youtube to demonstrate lots of other effects.  I like the effect for the background on a card, and I also like the way each one is unique as I would never be able to get the same image twice.  I hope to do more playing over the Christmas break.