Jaw-dropping beautiful!

Our last get-together this month had a theme: Bio Art!  Stephanie provided deer jawbones from her stash of animal skulls and bones, and we each did our thing with them.  Six of us worked on these, and we each came up with such unique ways to decorate them, and put our own personalities into them.

Below, details of Alyssa's (as yet unfinished) bone, covered mosaic-style in bits of crushed shells.

Lyndon's stylized design, front and back.

My (Michelle's) own composition had to be colourful and textured.  I'm calling this "Venison Stew".  Base coat of silver acrylic paint covered in a collage of upcycled magazine images from a veggie/seed catalogue, sprinkled liberally with glitter, and varnished.  I even took shots of the teeth under the microscope.

 

We look like we're having fun, don't we?

Abstracts with visiting Katya

We had a guest here last week, Katya returned for a visit after almost 4 years away.  As per our tradition, we held an abstract painting night, and boy, was it ever productive! We each finished 2-3 pieces by the end of the night, and the results were mostly impressive (I'm saying that because I'm not proud of a couple of my own pieces...).

 

Newcomer Lyndon surprised us all (and probably even himself) with his abstract painting skills (and/or his skills at reproducing tricks learned on YouTube).

Nicole and Lily came up with very interesting colour combinations and compositions:

Daniel finger-painted, and had us guessing about his subject matter until the end (it's a dragon; some of us thought of Smaug).

Curtis proved he has a knack for handling paint too!

I have plans for Curtis' painting of our Purple Van (aka Maroon Van, aka The Mystery Machine), which I hope to share in an upcoming post.

Finally, some close-ups of a few pieces we did using thin paint dripped on canvas and shaken ("fluid art", is it called? whatever it is, it's fun to play with!).

A Year Later...

Yikes, we haven't posted here in exactly a year!  We've met as a group a few times since (our Halloween get-together at Steph's place was probably the most memorable! as well as Jordan's farewell party in December), but weren't organized enough to take photos, so no records of any of it here.

Until now!  We met again last weekend, and this time I took some (not so clear) photos of work in progress.

Wood Burning!

I recently completed a project that was very new to me - I tried my hand at wood burning for the first time. I purchased a cheap, used acoustic guitar and removed the hardware/strings, stripped the original paint, and sanded it down entirely to the bare wood. I found some skull references online, and wood burned the images into the face of the guitar, and then filled the negative space in with freehand roses. I picked out some red and dark brown wood stains and a clear gloss varathane to use as a sealer, and used black acrylic paint for the sides of the guitar. After the stains and varathane had dried, I put all the hardware back on for a finished look.

Impressionist Night, again

We gave our Impressionist Painting experiment a second try last week, with successful results.  Between bouts of goofing off, and breaks to watch Jordan's film (we can't show it here, it's too large - but hopefully there will be a way to post it online somehow), we worked on copying Group of Seven paintings.

 Here's Angela hard at work on her painting, and see how great it turned out by the end of the night!

I chose Tom Thompson's "The West Wind", copied from a printed card.  And, in addition to painting it, I doodled it as well.

Here was my painting process, step by step, on a 9x12" canvas:

 

As a separate project, I tried my hand at wood burning (I was bitten with the wood burning bug the last time, when Stephanie showed off her work on the guitar).  I experimented on a 7x9" piece of plywood.  I tried to do my favourite doodles (the bubbles/rocks/circles), but the plywood was too rough/tough for the circles to come out smooth and round, so I drew a tree instead.  And a day or two later, I decided to add some colour to it as well (acrylic paint).  I love how it looks both like wood burning and stained glass at the same time!  I haven't varnished or shellacked it yet, but it would probably look even more like stained glass if I do.