Arty Activities

This past week, I’ve not been making cards but have been trying out different art media.  I've only really done watercolour painting so when I saw this acrylic workshop run by Charlotte, to create a contemporary seascape, I was interested to see how to use acrylic paints.  Plus, I love a sea scene!

The first painting was done using a paintbrush to blend the colours, starting with the sky.

Then the sea and the beach were added.

Finally, clouds were added using a palette knife.  One of the beauties of acrylics is that you can just paint over the dry paint if you want to add more to the painting.

For the next masterpiece, we used the sponge side of a scouring pad to blend the paints for the sky and sea, then used a brush and palette knife to add the details.  I really enjoyed this workshop and would like to try more acrylic painting now.

The second media new to me is pastel pencils.  I’d watched Jason Morgan’s YouTube video showing beginners how to draw a giraffe's eye and he made it seem so doable so I thought I’d give it a go.  After transferring the design to pastelmat paper, the dark and light areas were roughly marked in.

The next stage was blending the background colours and colouring the eye, getting the reflected light on the eyeball down correctly.

The final stage was to add the fur details.  I kept leaving it and going back, every time seeing a place where more work was needed.  I think this could have gone on indefinitely so I finally  called it done and added the eye lashes.  It took me about 7 hours altogether to do this but I’m so happy with the finished piece.

Jason very kindly offers this lesson for free and I’d definitely recommend checking out his channel if you’re fancying trying pastel pencils.  I found his tuition excellent and I’m encouraged to attempt more of his tutorials.