Season of art 101

What a wonderful season it has been at Get Messy! We’ve been focusing on art materials and how to use them. I’ve found this especially helpful and enjoyable because I have little to no experience of many of these materials. While there are some I used as a child – felt tips, crayons – I’ve been discovering all sorts of new ways to play around with them.

Each week there have been prompts and tutorials from the fantastic creative team which have helped to expand my awareness of what’s even possible when you start playing around with this stuff on a page. There’s something relaxing about trying out a single technique or material, and exploring the different effects it can have. Before long, my basket has become filled with an array of different things I can use when I get to work on something.

Week 1 – Watercolours

This was a wonderful medium to start with, especially as I had begun playing with watercolour over the winter holidays.

This last piece came from a wonderful gouache tutorial with Vanessa Oliver-Lloyd. I didn’t have any gouache so I used acrylics instead.

Week 2 – Texture

During this week, I enjoyed working without having a subject in mind or anything in particular I wanted to express. It felt incredibly freeing to simply play with colour and texture, sticking everything I could imagine down on the page – bubble wrap, beads, thread, postage stamps! After I had finished, this last page seemed to me to be the perfect expression of living in a house that’s in the middle of being renovated: theoretically at home and yet nothing is quite settled.

Week 3 – Acrylics

I had not worked with acrylics since I was at school and these are fast becoming my favourite medium. I love it that they can leave a certain amount of texture on the page and also that they dry so quickly.The above page was inspired by a wonderful layers tutorial with Pam Garrison. I talk more about the process here.

Week 4 – Felt tips

When I began art journaling, I was concerned that comics would be left behind! This week saw comics return in FULL COLOUR! The spread above was created during a Get Messy digi-hangout. It was wonderful to throw colours and shapes down on the page whilst chatting and hanging out, not really thinking about what I was doing. Again, this was very liberating. The resulting spread ended up being a piece about the meetup itself! More on the process here.Here I revisit the topic of house renovation. I have a feeling I may be revisiting this theme for quite a while!

Week 5 – Drawing

This week was one of my favourites. We had an amazing tutorial with Elizabeth of On tap for today filled with all sorts of ways in to drawing. Below are two of my favourites: drawing a series of the the same object and using torn collage as a starting point for your own drawing.

Week 6 – Collage

I didn’t manage to do as much collage as I would have liked during this final week of the season. But I absolutely loved working on this spread – another one which began during a digi-hangout! I was thrilled that the toadstools from the week before found their way into this piece!

If you have made it to the end of this post, thank you for staying with me. Next time, I will be sure to document the process week by week rather than leaving it all to the end!

This has been an incredible season at Get Messy. The only thing that can console me that it’s over is that there will be a new season starting very soon!