Florence Turnour's Blog

It's day 2 in  Creative Jumpstart , the  the online workshop I'm taking. Here's my project. The lesson by  Julie Fei-Fan Balzer  was to work with watercolor sticks, trying them dry on dry, dry on wet and wet on dry.  In this assignment we chose a painting and copied it using the water color sticks.   I chose the painting by Henri Matisse called Lorette with a Turban and a Yellow Jacket (d'ya think?). From: The National Gallery of Art One of the things I really love about Matisse's work is his use of pattern in the fabric and wall paper. The painting of Lorette did not have any such patterns however, so I decided to add my own. I made the background wall paper using one of my foam stamps and Distress ink. I like how the stamped image brought out the texture of the cold-press paper. Thanks, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, that was fun .

I signed up for an online workshop called Creative Jumpstart  in which 25 artists post technique videos inspired by various artwork. Check out the link to see the class; I recommend it (and though the name had me concerned, it is not a self-help through art thing). I don't think I'll manage to do a project each day, but at 11pm last night I decided what the heck and dove into the first one. In this project by Rae Missigman , we layered color and white paint to make a background, and dropped acrylic ink into white paint to get texture and color. I enjoyed using the acrylic ink this way.  I'm mentally shopping for more colors as we speak! I used one of my foam stamps  in the background, stamping with white over a colored background. I'm not sure how the cat feels about having a fishy background. He looks a bit nonplus. Thanks for looking!