5-day art challenge, day 4

Day 5 of the Facebook 5-day art challenge: some travel sketching from our 40th wedding anniversary trip to San Antonio, Texas. We had a lovely room with a terrace right on the Riverwalk and I was able to do LOTS of sketching over several days. Often when traveling, I am with non-sketchers and have limited time to sketch onsite, but this time I was able to sketch as much as I wished.

As a bonus, here are some sketches from the last Kansas State Fair we attended before moving to Texas. Bill was working a booth for the company he worked for, allowing me a full morning to wander and sketch.

5-day art challenge, day 2

I have been nominated to participate in Facebook's five-day art challenge, posting three art works per day for 5 days. So here goes with day number two:

In 2007, I began reading books on drawing and finding artists online, longing to get involved in sketchbook art. Seeing many artists posting from the Everyday Matters group challenge list (and reading Danny Gregory's excellent book), I decided that this was the best way to jump in.

Feeling intimidated, I first began in pencil --- this is my very first sketch in my first sketchbook. Fighting my fear of actually posting it online, I jumped in, at first on Flickr but eventually moving to Facebook and Blogspot.

Eventually I switched to working in ink (over pencil lines which I then erased). This is a sketch of the front of the 1920 apartment building my husband and I renovated in El Dorado, Kansas.

And eventually I switched to watercolor, though I had not yet taken the plunge to use watercolor paper --- that's why there are ripples on this drawing of our eldest granddaughter, Mikala.

From there, I began experimenting with toned papers, colored pencils, watercolor pencils and crayons, colored inks, and various brands of sketchbooks. I also learned how to bind my own sketchbooks, using my own choices of paper, shape, and size.

5-day art challenge, day one

I have been nominated to participate in a Five-Day Art Challenge on Facebook, where artists are invited to share 3 pictures of their work per day for five days.

John Lokke

For my first day's post, I'm revisiting the Riverside Watercolor Society. I was first introduced to watercolor in 2007 by John Lokke who led this informal group meeting weekly in a church in the Riverside area of Wichita, KS. We usually painted a chosen weekly subject in our different styles, and gave ourselves the name just for fun.

The above painting of sunflowers was a "happy accident" on a practice page. It now hangs framed in our Texas cabin to remind us of Kansas.

Another of the things we did is to study famous watercolorists like Karl Bodmer, Winslow Homer, and  Charles Burchfield. This sketch was from a Winslow Homer painting.

The church we met in requested that we present a small show of our work. We were studying Charles Burchfield at the time, so we each chose one or two of his paintings to replicate in whatever way we wish. The above painting is after Burchfield's work, "Abandoned Farmhouse". The painting below is my interpretation of Burchfield's "The Three Trees".