 |
Intel Contributor
|
 |
|
Intel Classification
|
|
|
This intel has been classified as Existing Authored Content, which means it was authored by the contributor, and first appeared on the contributor's blog or website.
|
|
Navigation
|
|
|
About Qassia
|
|
|
Find out more about Qassia by reading our About Us page, if you haven't done so already.
|
|
Qassia Mission
|
|
|
The objective of this site is to allow website owners and webmasters to efficiently
promote their web sites. Those promoting their websites on Qassia are rewarded with traffic and exposure for their
websites in our web directory. The ultimate goal of this site is to obviate the need for link exchanges
or submissions to web directories during the SEO (search engine optimization) process, and to instead focus
website promotion activity on the development of original content.
|
|
|
  |  PRINT THIS INTEL  EMAIL THIS INTEL |
|
Informal Drawing Groups
In the early nineties I met two women who were also artists. One was a brilliant and successful commercial designer with a number of advertising accounts and a fulltime assistant. The other was a powerful spiritual seeker and healer. I was, as usual, messing around. The commercial artist had a beautiful patio overlooking a lake. We met there once a week for several months. Each time, we created an assignment for ourselves. We drew a random word from a box. I think each of us wrote four or five words on slips of paper beforehand, but I don't really remember. We used soft pastels because they are colorful, fast, and do not require water. I was, at the time, using pastels on Canson paper to do my figure studies. (A few of my pastel figure works are displayed under "pastels" in my portfolio at Absolute Arts.) We only gave ourselves a few minutes, so the drawings for our group sessions were relatively small. When we all finished, we picked another word and drew again. After doing three or four pictures, we displayed them and talked about any personal memories or thoughts were associated with the pieces. I don't remember much about what we said. Whatever it was, it belonged to that stage in each of our lives, and we have all moved on, literally to other places. The process was important and valuable. Here's a word to the wise: put newspaper or a tarp under your work area when using pastel, even outdoors, and dispose of the dust properly. To my shame, I made a bit of a mess. Other, more important, factors contributed to the ending of our group, but that didn't help. Another thing to remember about working with friends: Every group has a lifetime. When you start to feel uncomfortable about going, stop. You may not know the reason, so you do not have to give one. Just move on. Blue Day Blue sky
Blue water
Blue music
Blue eyes
Buried blue
Emerging in blue Pastel: How does blue Grow? Like a grain of sand beside the shell:
an irridescent irritation. How does
blue dance?
Like a child
with golashes
and a polkadot umbrella
in the rain.
|
|
|
|
Contributor's Note
Some of my originals are available at Absolute Arts. POD prints can be ordered from Art.com, Zazzle, Redbubble, Imagekind, and Cafe Press. Each site offers different works and/or different formats.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Added by Linda Armstrong on April 12, 11:19 PM.
CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
Broken Face, Pastel on Paper (See Absolute Arts)
[FLAG THIS INTEL]
Interesting, but why do you run yourself down in this article? Pastels are messy, of course there's going to be a mess when you use them. I used to do pastel portraits in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and it'd get all over my hands, my t-shirt, whatever -- I did a lot of finger blending on the portraits and kept a wet towel handy to wipe my hands between color groups. Cleaning up afterward isn't a big deal. It picks up easily. There's nothing wrong with "just messing around," though. I'm a serious writer, a novelist, but I spend a lot of my time just messing around with anything and everything including art. It's good sanity maintenance. It makes life richer. Your art's good. Don't run yourself down because a couple of past friends took different directions in life from yours. If you're serious about art now and weren't as serious then, you still learned and enjoyed that time in your life. You're right about small topical groups, they grow and change and dissolve as people move and change their lives but the experience remains. That's a cool prompt. I may try something like that in my writing group as a prompts game, it'd be easy to apply to writing short stories or exercises like descriptive passages.
One medium you might enjoy since the messiness of soft pastels bothered you, but their speed and strong color was great, is either oil pastels or colored Conte crayons. I've done soft pastels for years and was put off by the price of the tiny colored Conte crayons, also I thought they were all spectrum brights and difficult to mix. I was so wrong. They mix easier than many soft pastels and are exactly the texture of normal Conte crayons. They are a little cleaner, only my hands get messy, they don't create as much dust while drawing and sketching. It's one of the few mediums where I regularly use a tiny 12 color pocket set and still get a good range of colors and values. Oil pastels are very cheap unless you get into artist grade ones, which I haven't tried yet, and you don't get the dust problem at all. Some are watersoluble, like Caran d'Ache Neocolor II, most are thinner-soluble and a quick wash with turpentine or odorless thinner will dissolve them into oil washes. They're fun. Very bold color and strong effects. Artist grade ones seem to cost about the same as artist grade soft pastels, maybe a little less.
|
