Last week two friends and I decided to join a 5 day on-line creative challenge. The basis was supposed to be painting but the ethos was pretty much ‘anything goes’. As it was a free thing, designed to enthuse participants to sign up for further paid classes, we were encouraged to use whatever was to hand; be it any type of paints, coloured pencils, markers, collage, or whatever you can think of to get something onto paper.
I chose acrylic paints partly because I use them when I gelli plate print and have a good supply, and partly because I thought splashing around with them would be fun.
The idea was to paint along with the tutor each day during the live video, which ran for about 45 minutes. I’ve never produced anything in 45 minutes before but gave it a go. Day 1 I filled my water jar, grabbed some brushes and a sheet of 300gsm water colour paper and started opening paint tubes.
45 minutes later I had (amazingly) covered the paper in paint. I left it to dry and then added some white gel pen and black Sharpie marks.
It reminds me of …. well, me – blocks, shapes and lines. My favourite things. Of course there’s no planned composition or colour scheme but it’s glaringly obvious that I’ve pretty much avoided blue, which has been a life-long trait. In fact there are a couple of blocks painted with Pthalo blue but as they overlay other colours they’ve edged towards green.
I decided to chop it up (on Photoshop) and concentrate on specific areas.
Not a bad composition, I like the colour placement and the black Sharpie lines but by blowing it up my white pen work looks pretty approximate.
Colours good, black lines good, positioning of white shapes good, not sure I’m thrilled with the squiggles. Let’s turn it around.
I have the same issue, the left hand squiggles aren’t working for me but the rest is fine.
This one I like the best, and a smidge of blue is evident in the bottom right hand corner.
On this day I learned it’s fun to mess about without a plan and I should avoid squiggles unless they are buried under other layers.
TactualTextiles 
These are fantastic! I’m always amazed at the talent some people have for…is the right word composition? Basically, arranging patterns and designs in an artistically appealing way. I mean, I already knew you had that knack from your other typical mediums. But still, it’s very impressive. It’s very much “display on the wall” type art from my view.
Thanks so much Jon. I have to say, it was fun and it reinforced some of my arty leanings, which was good.