"The Best Things in Life Are Free"

I pay good money for art instruction and inspiration--purchasing books and magazines, enrolling in classes and workshops, and even my once-in-a-lifetime (thus far!) retreat experience.  

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So I don't feel quite so badly about focusing for a post on some freebie resources that I have accessed, which you can access as well. I can be a bit of a miser at heart, so finding high-quality, inspiring, and instructive resources for free can really make my day!

Just yesterday on Facebook, a post appeared for Sketchbook Skool, which seems to have been created and facilitated by the wonderful Danny Gregory and Koosje Koene.  While there are many different Kourses (they love to spell everything with the letter "k"!) available for purchase, this Facebook post offered a free eBook entitled, Create with Love: Ideas to Share Your Love Creatively.

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Just in time for Valentine's Day, Nelleke Verhoeff offers fun ideas like creating faces from hearts, and incorporating them into collage-style postcards; doodling with lips and kisses; creating a "personal pie" (you'll have to see the eBook to understand!); creating sticky note love doodles and a love garland. There are projects for poems and patterns, as well as alphabets and abstracts.  All fun, all free.

After I signed up and received my free eBook, I received an email inviting me to take a free Sketchbook Skool Kourse.  It didn't take long to watch through each of the lessons, and with the unlimited access, I can go back and take my time, working through the exercises that were presented. There is a fun exercise about recording your day in the style of a comic book, instruction on sketching using negative space, as well as instruction on continuous line drawing.  These are all great exercises that could keep a beginner sketch artist (and a veteran, too, I would imagine) busy for quite some time as they began a "sketch habit."

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The Sketchbook Skool blog also offers a variety of free inspiration and instruction through the text, pictures, and videos incorporated into its posts.  

Finally, I made a list of all of the instructors mentioned throughout the Sketchbook Skool web site, and discovered that plugging them into a YouTube search uncovered hours and hours and hours worth of free videos offering their instruction and inspiring looks at their own sketchbooks.

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I think it is very important to support art instructors' effort to offer quality instruction through their for-sale products.  But I also know that costs can sometimes be prohibitive for people who want to explore different or unfamiliar fields of art or creativity.  I continue to be excited about all of the resources that these same talented and dedicated artists have made available for us for the low cost of an Internet search.

I just couldn't keep these free resources to myself!

My First Letter Writing Social

A Letter Writing Social Tablescape

I have been hearing about Letter Writing Socials for years, especially from Pamela at Cappuccino and Art Journal and Mary England of Uncustomary.  The main goal of the letter writing social is to keep the art of the written letter alive in this age of emails and other digital communications.

Like-minded people gather around typewriters, pretty papers, pens, stickers, decorative tapes and other staples of the traditional-meets-modern letter writer.  They sit at tables that are deliciously crowded with supplies and other letter-writers' works-in-progress.  They sip tea, or coffee, or wine--depending on the venue--and leave with postcards or letters written, stamped, and ready to send.

The Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA

I attended my first Letter Writing Social in mid-August at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore and Cafe in Harrisburg, PA.  Our organizer Anne had loads of supplies to offer us, and several of us brought contributions, as well.  My mother came along with me, and I had an opportunity to see my old friend Becky (the Snail Mailer) and meet the illustrious Mary England, blogger-author-and-life enthusiast, promoter of self-love and creativity.

My Mom and I, fan-girling with Mary

Our location was perfect--tables set up right in the heart of the bookstore.  Not only did we have attendees who knew of the event ahead of time, but we also drew in passers-by who were often mystified and then delighted to discover that we were "just sitting there writing letters."

Our organizer, Anne, with Mary England at the start of the social

Our typewriter station, with Becky on the right

We had some young participants who enjoyed the mysteries of the ancient typewriter.

Sometimes the letter-writing became a family affair:

And there were some couples who made Sunday a letter-writing afternoon date:

There was lots of enthusiasm generated by the social, whether expressed by diligent work or big smiles.

For my part, I prepared several postcards, and wrote messages on three of them (including one I mailed to myself!).  Everyone was generously sharing their supplies (to the extent that they were saying, "Take these papers, take these stickers---please!) so I expanded some of my mail art stash as well.

And if ever I needed some visual inspiration, I could always gaze around at my favorite sight--shelves upon shelves upon shelves of books at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.  They have an impressive collection of over 200,000 new and used books, and offer a popular community meeting space in my state's capital city.

Anne is already planning the next Letter Writing Social in October.  I am looking forward to getting back to my mail art making and letter writing, with the help of Mary's Snail Mail eCourse.  If you are interested in finding out more about the fun of old-fashioned/new-fangled letter writing, Mary has tons of resources, and you can email me at aleakaskey@yahoo.com for more information too!

Lettering Apprenticeship

People across the Blogosphere are devouring resources related to improving their handwriting and lettering in order to spruce up their art journal pages, planners, and personal correspondence.

As evidenced by over 200 pins on my "Lettering, Handwriting" board on Pinterest, I am one of those people in search of the perfect handwriting that has eluded me since kindergarten!

Recently, I sat down with a whole screen filled with Stephanie Ackerman's doodles, lettering, and artwork, and put myself into the position of apprentice: studying her style, copying her work, looking to internalize her approach.

My effort, emulating Stephanie's artwork; I included only the first part of the verse.

I love Stephanie's quirky, playful, casual style that incorporates cursive and print, capitals and lower case, colors and black & white.  Her work looks so spontaneous, but those arrangements of words and doodles must be well-planned.

I made slight changes to Stephanie's version, mainly because of the size of my sketchbook page.

I also love how Stephanie works with Bible verses, favorite quotations, and inspiring phrases in her artwork.  There are so many possibilities for creating encouraging artwork based on my own favorites!

I made three different drawings in my sketchbook, and then reduced them by 50% on the copier.  (Once I accidentally reduced the 50% drawings by 50%, and got tiny little artworks from them!)  I cut and pasted them onto one page, and then printed it out on sticker paper.

Next, I cut each of the little stickers for use in my planner.

A couple of them made their way into this week's planner spread:

I added some red marker for "pop" on this one.

This was one of the tiny ones, and got some decorative tape and doodling in order to stand out.

At first, I was embarrassed when my 7-year-old asked me, "Mom, why are you just copying from her work?" But I think that copying can be a valid step in the process of developing my artistic style.  Just like the apprentices of the Renaissance era would copy the masters and even add to their works, I see this stage of copying as one step towards developing content, style, and and approach of my own.

In an article I found entitled, "The Making of an Artist," the author writes of Renaissance apprentices:

"Pupils...then learned to draw, first by copying drawings made by their masters or other artists.  Drawing collections served not only as training aids for students but also as references for motifs that could be employed in new works...Young artists also learned from copying celebrated works that could be seen in their own cities--Michelangelo, for example, copied paintings by Giotto in Florence's church of Santa Croce--and they were encouraged to travel if they could, to Rome especially, to continue their visual education."

What do you think?  Shameless copying, or valid step in the learning process?

If Michelangelo himself employed this method for learning, I'm going to take my chances!

Exploring Dendritic Painting

My online blogging and mail art friend, Jewels, over at Just Tickety-Boo, introduced me to the idea of dendritic painting.  She sent me a link to a You Tube video by Mike at Atomic Shrimp.  In under four minutes, Mike introduces a painting technique that kept me playing around for hours!

When I decided to give dendritic painting a try, I set up my workshop/play space in the kitchen, rather than my cream-color-carpeted art studio, for perhaps obvious reasons.

I gathered some favorite supplies:

         1.  paintbrushes (in a stylish storage pot)--

          2. a selection of papers (including watercolor, acrylic, Bristol, text,
          tag, and scrapbooking cardstock)--

          3. and a worktop protected by paper grocery bags, a huge supply
          of acrylic tube paints (thanks to my sister, two Christmases ago),
          and--most importantly--two pieces of 8x10 inch glass pilfered from
          some old picture frames in the basement--

Here is the basic process for how dendritic painting works:

Step 1: Squeeze a small amount of acrylic paint in one or several colors onto one piece of glass, and move it around with your paintbrush for roughly even coverage:

Step 2: Place the second piece of glass onto the first piece of glass, and hold down firmly so all parts of the surfaces touch one another. Often, but not always, I could see the interesting patterns start to emerge at this stage.

Step 3: Carefully pull the two pieces of glass apart, not letting them slide across one another; the trick is to be sure that one piece lifts directly off the top of the other.  At first I tried using the Xacto knife and the steel triangle above to help me, but I found it easier just to set the two pieces of glass off center from one another and pull them apart at the corners with my fingers.

Step 4: Take a moment to enjoy the interesting "dendritic" designs that remain on the glass.  Dendrites, as I understand it, are the branches that come out of a nerve cell. Rocks and minerals can also form these tree-like, branching patterns.  They have a wonderful organic, though amazingly precise, appearance that becomes even more evident in the next step.

Step 5: Place your chosen type of paper over the top of the paint-covered glass, and use your fingertips to gently press the paper to the paint.  I watched Mike's video, as well as videos by two different women using his technique, and everyone emphasized applying very little pressure to the paper. I found that my results were better when I was moved my fingers around slowly but firmly in all areas of the paper.  Carefully peel the paper up to see your print.

And because you have a second piece of glass, you can take a second print, which will offer something of a mirror image, with some color variables, for another piece of paper.

I think the results of this painting technique are quite amazing, especially looking close up at the branch-like effects:

In the sample above, I used three different colors, but mixed them pretty thoroughly on the glass.  For this next example, I kept three different colors in separate strips:

 Here were the resulting prints this time:

 Again, look at the amazingly detailed branch patterns:

 Some of my very favorite prints came from combinations of greens on the glass:

Greens are a natural choice for these kinds of patterns:

Don't these look like mountain ranges?

I thought for sure the paints on this glass wouldn't make a good print because they were so thick:

But the print came out very thickly textural, and still quite detailed:

After about two hours of playing around, I had a whole breakfast table full of papers using the dendritic painting technique:

Here are some other papers from the new collection:

 Gold paint on purple scrapbooking cardstock--royal!

 Black ink on French text page--interesting!

 White paint on blue cardstock--frosty!

A set of three different papers--cheerful!:

My kitchen work space survived its first experience with dendritic painting pretty well; it is surprisingly easy to clean up after (though I used a lot more paper towel than my environmentally-concerned self was totally comfortable with).  I think it will be seeing more of the technique in the future, since I had so much fun with it.

I will be using some of my prints to create mail art--at least one piece to send to Jewels!--so stay tuned for the finished results.