What I've been working on in May

Ive been doing a lot of different stuff this month.  I joined Willowing and have signed up for Tam's free course in Art, Heart and Healing. (This is a four week course and is so brilliant, I highly recommend it).
I'm also taking the Portraits & Petite Dolls course with Suziblu.  These courses are self-guided, so its great that I've plenty time to do them. I've watched all the videos and it is very interesting and I know its taking my art in new directions as is Tam's course.
At the LAA (Livingston Art Association) I've been learning to work from my sketchbook and  I've just finished my first canvas inspired by one of my sketches.  This was a fun progression to watch.

The above was a scanned copy of the canvas when the background was done so I could play with a few ideas.  The drawing of the tree, birds and leaves were first drawn out in glue and then the background was layered using a brayer.  The brayering made the glue very unstable so before the canvas dried, I peeled it off and it acted like a resist, leaving an outline of my drawing which I took as a happy accident.
I was trying for a relief effect but worked with what I got instead.  Once I had the copy I started to play with collage pieces for the birds and ink ideas for the tree and leaves.  I do like some of the outcomes in this painting but decided when I went for it on the canvas for real, to keep exploring and trying out new things.

The Canvas developed. It is called 3 Little Birds, Singing Don't Worry.  I kept the Thorntons foil sweet wrappers for the birds and did some pen work in the wings and leaves, then decided to use an SNP party political newspaper for the tree.  I kept thinking of what the birds message was (as the entire canvas was inspired by the song 3 little birds by Bob Marley). I liked the idea of playing with the contrast of current politics against the message of the song.  Especially since universally our economies are in turmoil.

 

The above two paintings are from an altered book I'm making in Tam's Art, Heart & Healing Course.
The board book is fun and challenging to do.  These were the work for Week Two of the course.
The background for the Dear Little Chelle spread was brayered and then the photos & lettering was printed and then every piece was integrated into the page.
The Friendship & Love was given a watercolour washed background and then the little whimsy dolls were drawn and painted on watercolour paper, cut out and then their dresses and the tree was collaged.
I found lots of little flower embellishments from card making scrap kits and played around with these till I was happy with the layout, finally finishing it off with some stamped lettering.

Following Suzi's portrait class I decided to try out a portrait spread in my sketchbook.  I also played around with some collage pieces for the background and some words from a very old newspaper I had lying around. I had a lot of fun making this sketchbook spread.