PEACE Blog Hop at Community Thrive

~PEACE~

I feel very honored to be joining Heather and Mystelle
at Community Thrive
in their very first ART CHALLENGE  blog hop today.

I am sharing this day with four other artists who took the same inspiration~
Loraine Rigby of Loraine's Art n Crafts 
Gabriele Langfeldt- Feldmann of Art-A-Tag
Regina Berweinof Sisters Art Lab
Renee Stein of The Tin Goat 
So do make sure you visit them all
 and leave a comment because we all love to hear from you.

Joining in this blog hop was just the inspiration I needed to do a few things I have wanted to do for a very long time, and I think you can tell I am very new to the whole video making process but I had a ball and learned so much.
 I now have a River Girl Art you tube channel and I want to make more videos than I can find time for, but first I have a lot of research to do to find a better way of mounting the camera and setting things up.
I have to thank my wonderful 16 yo son for doing all the technical things and using his camera- love you Jarrah.

This month we are creating a piece of art based on  PEACE and  playing with multiple textures. There was also another prompt of favourite movie, but I am not really a movie girl so I just went with peace and used multiple textures.

My art piece is a page in my loose leaf art journal.
I started work listening to John Lennon
and playing with colour and pattern,
loosening up and feeling my way onto the art.

The peaceful colours I played with were purples and blues. pinks and white,
once I had my collage elements down I added more colour
with my neo colour II's while the medium was still wet.
I wanted to pull it all together and leave a nice texture for what was to follow
so I covered it all up with tissue paper in my chosen colours,
and left it to dry just before I went to bed
 I decided it needed some more colour
 so I smeared on some flouro pink and left it overnight..

Establishing a peaceful space the next morning was a bit more challenging
 with the boys up and about
so we all sat down to pot of orange and cinnamon rooibos
and talked about peace and setting intentions and quiet activities.

 I gathered up some more supplies that felt right,
gesso- it is never far from my work space,
a range of my home made stamps, some stamp pads,
 a few acrylic paints and the neo's.
 Then I just needed some music and it was time to play.

I love working like this, intuitively and playfully
to me that is what art is all about.
 I did some stamping into a fresh layer of gesso but
 I think there was already so much texture underneath
 they did not show up very much when I tried to pick them up with the neo's
so I started to draw with them
and ended up with a peace symbol embedded in my layers.
Filled in the spaces with some stamping
then activated the neos and added some gesso.

I often use the gesso like this with neo's
as I like the tonal quality but I mainly like that it acts as a fixative
 and keeps that creamy dreamy paint right where I want it.

When everything was dry again I wanted to instill even more peace into my page
 so I added some lyrics from the night before
Imagine by John Lennon was just right
and my trusty posca paint pens did it with ease.

I was watching the paint dry  (as I do)
and contemplating how to finish my page
and I could see a dove of peace hiding on my page-
perfect.

I picked him out with a white stabilo pencil
then outlined him with a white paint pen
I wanted something sky like around him that was transparent
to show all of my delicious layers underneath,
 I started with a paint brush  but wanted more transparency
so I used a baby wipe to fill in the sky and I used the wipe to blend the paint pen
 inside the bird and remove the sky colour so he has a more defined look

One of the things I learned was it would be good to have taken photographs
 at each stage as well as the video,
 I did try to get stills from the video but they were too blurry.

I will also be more careful with placement of supplies and my art work
in relation to the camera so all in all I discovered the art of making video's is rather like making art and there is always lots of room for improvement and more and more opportunities for learning.