Florence Turnour's Blog

I haven't had time to do many of the exercises in this on-line watercolor class , but I've really enjoyed watching the videos. In one of the videos, Dawn uses a wet on wet technique to add color, and then paints in the background to highlight the shape. She did this with some leaves with spectacular effect. I thought I'd try the technique on some fur. Here's the result. Thanks for looking!

Today I donned the face mask and took to the garage to spray paint some papers for collage. I used the same stencils I've been using on the Gelli Plate, which I cut on my electronic Silhouette cutter. I still need to learn how to strategize to get patterns where I want them with the spray paint, but I managed to get some prints that I like. I also did some experiments with one of my face stencils. I didn't have a goal when I designed the face stencils. I'm hoping to come up with a collage idea in which it makes sense to use them. Thanks for looking!

Last week, in my continuing effort to squeeze as much art as possible in before school starts, I attended a two-day workshop with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer  at Studio CRESCENDOh  in Santa Ana.  In it I started two large collage paintings, one of which I finished today. Look how big it is! Goat! by Florence Turnour For this canvas, Julie directed us to draw a large half-face, but I decided I'd rather have a half goat face.  She reassured us that almost anything with a mouth and eyes will be recognizable as a face, but it occurred to me about a quarter of the way in that this was not necessarily true for goats.  I used a snapshot from my phone, and worried over the minimal drawing on my canvas for a while before diving in.  (I was finally spurred forward when Julie's mother, Eileen, passed by my table and said, "Oh, a goat." Sometimes even goats need validation.) I was super excited to learn how to glue.  Collage has always been one of my favorite med...

For Day 8 of the    Creative Jumpstart  (I skipped a few) , artist Brigit Koopsen  demonstrated a painting in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.  I found Basquiat's art grim though  fascinating, but I loved how Brigit pulled inspiration from Basquiat while much of the grim behind. I may have taken more inspiration from Brigit than from Basquiat in the end. I did the drawing and decided I would get the most out of it if I actually tried to take something from Basquiat's work. I chose my colors from the images in the Creative Jumpstart pinterest collection. I also added the scribbled writing as a vague tribute to Basquiat's word-laden imagery.   Do keep your eyes open, because sometimes there really is already a pterodactyl in the dumptruck  Thank you, Brigit. That was a fun assignment.

In the workshop  Creative Jumpstart  that I am doing, yesterday's lesson involved acrylic spray paint.    Michelle Ward  demonstrated spray painting through stencils using layers and masks.  I tried it with spray ink, which was fun, too, but it was much more interesting to work with the opaque spray paints.  I wanted to do it outside, so I had to wait for a break in the rain. It came this afternoon, and I took over the garage floor. I spent some of the rainy days cutting new pattern stencils on my Sihlouette Cutter. I draw them in Adobe Illustrator and then use a plugin to cut them. The pattern in the images above is my favorite.  I also painted my hands, just a bit.   About the colors, Michaels had an odd selection of their paints on sale. I bought 7 colors, but they were not the ones I'd have chosen if I had not been trying to be frugal. For example, here's a series in lemon and tomato. Here's a close-up of th...

In the workshop Creative Jumpstart that I am doing, yesterday's lesson involved acrylic spray paint, which is (no I'm not kidding) an art supply that I didn't own (yes, I got some). The video by Michelle Ward made it look like so much fun, I thought a little spray paint could be fun to own.  It was actually on sale at Michaels; I think they are downsizing since only the weird colors were on sale. I got a few but I haven't used them yet, since, in an odd turn of events, it is raining making my well ventilated (back yard) work area soggy. In the meantime, I decided to try the activity with Dylusions sprays.  I cut fish stencils out of printer paper and then sprayed them with a waterproof sealant (since I was pretty sure I'd be drowning them in ink).  Some of my prints worked well, without much leakage under the stencil, but I like the bright colors you get by soaking the paper so I chose this one, which was not an excellent print. After writing on it with Permap...

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!