December Challenge

December’s challenge: 

Step outside your comfort zone and 

use various media together or 

use a medium you don’t normally use.

I can’t wait to see what you do!

Pieces of 8

I used to meet weekly with a painting gang that had all kinds of ways to stimulate and inspire us.  Lately they have had monthly challenges and everyone posts their results on the blog.  As an "emeritus" member of the Pieces of 8, I occassionally join in.

My challenge (in addition to the assignment above) was that I was mostly housebound recovering from my knee surgery.  Nevertheless I found a way to use what was laying around.

The two photos above show the results of my "Forest Floor" cards, steam printed on watercolor paper using leaves gathered in the High Country.  They are beautiful but invariably there are some pages that are real "duds" and just don't print well enough to sell.

See what I mean?

But I happened to have some of my homemade ink on hand (no brushes so I used q-tips) as well as a 

couple of colored sharpie-like pens.

I set to work "enhancing the colorations of the leaves by using the acorn grey ink, the tumeric yellow, the hibiscus magenta (which sometimes turned bluish) and the brown ink made from tea.

The leaves were definitely more pronounced but not as interesting as I wanted them to be.  So I dug out my colored pens and set to work doodling tiny scratches, dots and squiggle lines to emphasize eye flow and certain details.  This part was the most fun as I got lost in the mediative feel of making tiny marks and trying to blend colored dots as done in pointillism.  Once I got over the idea of natures colors and felt free to use what I had, I found it hard to quit!

Here are two - can you match them from the start? 

Ta da!  Calling them done.  I think I was outside my comfort zone the minute I took up the colored pens and I certainly used a brand new (to me) medium with the homemade inks from my kitchen.  Challenge completed.  To see what everyone else did you can check this post at the end of the month.

I need to think about what I learned and how it might apply to future work.  I definitely want to play with the inks more (and make a for-real blue ink).  These were good learning pages and were definitely a good distraction from all things medical. 

Have you challenged yourself lately? Moved out of your comfort zone or tried a new product, ingredient, a foreign method or even different radio channel?  Reporting on these prompts makes me more likely to follow through on them so feel free to share with me your latest experiment. I promise to be impressed!

EXPERIMENTALLY YOURS,

Cindy