As I wrote the title for this post I am finding the irony in last week’s challenge word.
As you may remember we have been rearranging rooms in our home and my husband and I just moved our bedroom downstairs this past weekend. Our intention was to make the room pet free and that lasted about 10 minutes. For the past 3 days our new bedroom has been the favorite room in the house for, well, everyone!
I am still setting up my creative space and we still have quite a bit to take out of the old room but I’m hopeful to get that all moved around this week and then next week I can hopefully focus on painting the room for my youngest daughter. I have just started a 30 Day Creativity Retreat so I should have plenty of time. (You can read about and follow my Creativity Retreat on my other site if you like).
I did manage to film a creative corner tour and I hope to get the footage edited and up for you to see and then I do promise to share a tour of my little creative corner in our new room. For now though, I still have some work to do.
If you remember last week’s creative challenge word was: Cats. In all honestly I completely forgot about the challenge until last night before bed so I am a little late getting today’s post up. I had been reading Carla Sonheim’s book “Drawing & Painting Imaginary Animals” and I was really enjoying it. I am looking forward to picking it back up after my 30 days are up but in the meantime I thought I would have a play with ink blots to make my cat.
First, I started with a sheet in my mixed media sketchbook (It’s a Canson mixed media which I love-the one with the blue cover) and I wet the paper and used my acrylic inks to drop colors onto the wet areas. I could sit and watch the colors spread for hours it’s so pretty. Once I did a few splotches I dabbed up some excess water and let them dry.
My hope was that at least one would take shape as a cat.
It didn’t.
They all somehow seemed like Halloween characters to me and so I lightly added some details and wrote down what I saw in each blot. At first I was feeling a little disappointed with my artistic skills wishing I could more correctly convey what my mind was seeing. Then I remembered that this is supposed to be fun and since a cat didn’t emerge the first time I could just go again. So I did.
No cat.
This time I saw a horse and I realized that these were just really fun and great warm up exercise for me to get playing with my creativity. Instead of starting with an ink splotch I decided to sketch out a cat. Initially I thought about looking up an image online then I remembered my Offline Retreat and took a look at the 2 cats snoozing on my bed. (See, the no pets in the bedroom thing was a terrible idea!)
It’s a very childlike cat but you know I had so much fun making it! I loved the black and white look-something I never do and I really enjoyed blending my Stabillo graphite pencil to blur the cat. To be honest I liked it best before I added to it but it’s such a great way to learn and to play. I learned how much I liked working in black and white and with a simple graphite pencil so I am going to be sure and play more this week.
So that is my challenge for last week. For this week I thought it would be fun to do something a little different. Instead of a word prompt I am going to challenge you to: finish a project. Take something you maybe picked up but have worked on lately or maybe something that is close to being done but you didn’t quite get there yet. Pick anything you want and be sure to share your link below and check out some of the other creatives and what they are up to. I will be coming back to this post when my 30 day retreat is up to see all that you have shared. I cannot wait!
I did film a process video that you can check out below. I left in the first ink blot attempts and I would love to hear what you see in the images.
Music by Joystock – https://www.joystock.org
Until next time…
-Michele, aka The Dreaming Dilettante
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