Moving On...

Members of the Portland Art Collective decided not to continue our Open Doors Art Show and Sale. We celebrated our success with a party.  Each person received a booklet.  Through a guided imagery exercise of our show history, we created our impressions of this journey.  Here's a look at my booklet and experience.  We contributed one-inch squares to have a little piece of art from each person in our book.

My experience is one of evolving into an artist, learning to put my art out in public, market and sell it.  Click onto the photo to enlarge it.

The Open Doors Show offered me a chance to learn about marketing, finance, organizing and hanging a show.  Through this process, I've made good friends, created a body of artwork and took pride in all that we accomplished in the five years that we held the show. 

For the cover, I used some of my new lettering arts skills.

back cover...

Thanks to all of my blog readers who came to the show and supported it.  For now, I want to finish some projects, continue learning how to paint, use color, collage and develop my style - to keep evolving.

Follow me on Pinterest

Friends encouraged me to join the online visual bulletin board, Pinterest.  I finally did it and added a link to my blog.  It's a work in progress, a fun way to get inspiration, keep track of favorite artists, teachers and what's important in my life. Thanks for checking it out.

From My Sketchbook

The past month, we sketched a couple times at Luscher Gardens.  This community garden is one of my favorites.  Late summer flowers bloom -the dahlias and sunflowers- vegetables ripen ready to harvest.

A sketchy, watercolor landscape-

Swiss chard-

 Lots of  brown-eye susans-

 

all planted in large groupings-

and one of my favorite summer flowers- hollyhocks

Hope you're enjoying summer.  I feel Autumn in the air and changes in the season coming.

Abstraction Using Color

The next painting class with Cynthia Herron emphasized abstraction using color.  I took a photo of a puppy as my subject.  Here's the final painting.  I'm still pondering whether or not I like more realistic or abstract paintings.  This painting still has a lot of realism in it so that you recognize the dog.  The painting is 12x12 inches.

I started with Daniel Smith's venetian red gesso as an under painting.  The first colors that I choose I did not like.  The values are too similar.

I played with the colors in Photo Shop and came up with a different color scheme.

Then, I walked to Fred Meyer to select matching or similar colors in paint chips. 

I mixed these colors and wrote the paint names and amounts on the back of the paint chips for future reference.  It was a challenge to mix the paints and come up with the colors that I wanted.  The photo of  the final painting has a greenish tint to it vs the original.  He is cute.  I'm not sure this is my style of painting.

Color becomes more complex the more I study it.  I want to learn more and explore it further.