Painting and Quilting

What a day!  I had time today for my painting class, stash-busting, piano practice, walk, and quilting - all in one day; what's not to like?

 

This was my first painting class in longer than I like to remember.  First the problem was my eyes, then our travel schedule, then my father-in-law's decline and death, the estate busy-ness, and now?  Voila, back into some of my favorite activities.  I took one of my older photographs (pre-digital camera) with me to use for a new painting.  It presents some issues I need to resolve before embarking on a larger painting - different subject but similar problems.  However, today's class was geared around a lesson on pen and ink drawings - something the class had begun last week.  Rarely one to pass up an opportunity to learn something, I put aside my plans and decided to work on pen and ink even though with the way the class is structured, I didn't have to.

 

It's been a long time since I've used pen in drawing and even longer since I've worked with ink washes.  Today's mini-workshop was terrific!  After a brief slide show of pen and ink drawings with descriptions of techniques used, we were encouraged to try doing some experimenting on our own.  I love the way Sharon teaches.  We were each given three different types of  paper (regular flat surface drawing paper, watercolor paper, and a rougher watercolor paper), and if we didn't have one with us (fortunately I just happened to) a pen with the right kind of ink.  We didn't have to make a drawing or do anything we didn't feel comfortable doing.  Each one of us did something different, but we all experimented first.

 

I decided I would draw the subject of my planned painting and include my experimenting in it.  So in the upper left I made some squiggly lines that could be used for leaves.  Then a bit farther down the same side I drew hard straight lines and some cross-hatching (parallel lines crossed in the opposite direction with more parallel lines).  Then I applied a bit of water to create the wash (later I applied water to the surface first and experimented by drawing on a wet surface).  I did that on all three papers.  It didn't take me long to decide I had to use a watercolor paper.  As we were doing thing, Sharon came around and gave each of us one larger piece of watercolor paper.

 

Here is my drawing:

 

The different colors were caused by also experimenting with a different pen that had a different ink.  I certainly didn't expect black ink to become greenish; isn't it neat?