Halloween Masks and Autumn Crowns

30 October 2019

A simple fun way to make a Halloween mask or Autumnal crown is to use a long strip of thick paper sized to fit around the wearer’s head, and decorate and trim this to your fanciful and fantastical desire!

You can enjoy experimenting with different styles of masks, from superhero to elegant to monstrous, to animal or tribal..

Useful materials:
Scissors, double sided tape, pencil, paint pens such as posca, coloured paper such as heavy sugar paper, oil pastels or crayons, inks using a brush, or artbrushes as we used, leaves – carefully choose the colours and shapes of leaves.

We found inspiration and tips from the website Handmade Charlotte.

Category: Art Tags: Creative preparation

Laying out materials for the drawing trees day

5 June 2018

We set out packs for each person joining the group, with different textures of papers suitable for rubbings and drawing, and a small bag with graphite stick and oil pastels, and a mix of pens too.

For the larger and joint pieces we have a wide array of brushes which will be fun to play around with, colour inks and water based paints, as well as Indian and sumi ink.

Category: Art Groups Tags: Creative preparation

Preparing for a drawing trees day in June

31 March 2018

Tree drawings by Margaret Kerr and Blair Thomson

We are preparing for a summery day of drawing trees in the countryside outside Glasgow near Lenzie with Margaret Kerr. The day will be on the 2nd of June. It will be nice to be outside and engage with the trees and nature through our senses and with slow contemplative drawings as well as trying out fun ways of working like rubbings and drawing on a large floor piece together 🙂

Tree drawings by Margaret Kerr and Blair Thomson

Category: Art Groups Tags: Creative preparation

Preparation for Zen Heart Brush

9 March 2018

We will try working from the old visual pictgrams, first curved into shell and bone, for kou (光) and myou (明). Koumyou means radiant light, which combines well with our other character Spring (春)! We will look at the tensho as well as kaisho styles and have some fun with markmaking and listen to some poetry.

Category: Art Groups Tags: Creative preparation

Painting with sumi ink – Sho practice

10 March 2017

Making some marks with fude brushes and fudepen. Beginning sho practice with the brush stopping and flicking, speed of the marks and energy. Kanji characters ten – heavens/ sky and shin or kokoro – heart/ mind.

Category: Art Groups Tags: Creative preparation

Graphic design geometric tasks

10 March 2017

Using art brushes (filled with ink) and Prockey and Maped pens to experiment on cartridge paper with a graphic design balance of colours and angular shapes. The ink creates a good textural contrast with the less flat more marky pens which helps with variety in the design. We have aimed for some pieces to keep the tones of the colours as similar as possible whilst looking for colour contrast (which can be a bit tricky!), others have tonal as well as colour contrast in them.

Category: Art Tags: Creative preparation