I was rather nervous about Wall Art week as I haven't painted in years, and never with actual paint. However the week did start promising enough with a scavenger hunt of sorts, textures, papers, and other odd bits I had laying around the house. We were limited by colour scheme, based on our star sign, mine was apparently blue and green for Aquarius. I also put together a sheet of textures and shapes- which was satisfyingly messy.As always I had no idea where Lilla was going with this.
Lilla put together a great PDF collection of wall art that she hoped would inspire us, based on several themes. Geometrics, painterly, collage and mixture of all three. I've been very drawn to geometrics as the course progress and decided I wanted to concentrate on this in some way. As mentioned I don't paint as a such but gave two canvases my best shot. It soon became apparent that they were lacking in some sort of focal point or cohesive element. A bout of flu made me step away from them for 24 hours, however I was able to see where areas were lacking and hoped to make up for lost time.
I'm not sure if it was my cold & flu medication wearing off or my brain function returning because I decided early Sunday morning, approx 12 hours before the assignment was due I DIDN'T LOVE THEM. I very much enjoyed playing with paint and collage but I felt my skills just didn't match the grand plans I had for this week.
I took many deep breaths and had a long hard think about what I could achieve in the next 12 hours. This was like a job for the A -TEAM, although I created a file called 'Plan B'. This time I chose the quote BEFORE I started creating and very much kept it in mind in the following hours. I had to call in the help of Photoshop and scanned in almost every bit of art I'd produced that week.
Thankfully I really LOVED what I created, and despite the long hours and complete turn around it was worth it. This course is teaching me so much about myself and calling up reserves of energy I din't know I had. Also I learnt that it really is important to love what you do, and I still enjoy creating aesthetically pleasing ladies even after many years away from editorial illustration.