having fun with paint and a sketchbook

i'm having a nice time this week playing with paint and sketchbooks.  i'm taking sarah ahearn's online class "pages and paint" and it's just been nice to have time to paint and play.  i even signed up my two daughters for summer day camp and preschool this week so i could have a whole 3 hours to myself just to enjoy the quite house and my bright studio.  wish i could do this every day! :)

the above two paintings came from a fun game that we played where we took a handful of prompts, but them in a bucket, and blindly picked one at a time.  we had two minutes for each prompt and the prompts ranged from simple ("add collage bits to your canvas") to scary ("paint and scribble with your eyes closed")!  i love the results.  i found that my paintings were more free and interesting this way.  it's a great exercise in letting go.  try it sometime!

part of the classwork is to keep a small sketchbook and to take it out with you into the world and capture just every day life.

i made the above two sketchbook spreads while i was at a water park with my daughter (a park with a tiny water feature-like fountain...no way would i take my eyes off of her in a pool!)  i wanted to capture just the essence of color, shapes and sounds.

and summer is not complete without fresh fruit! especially cherries, watermelon, plums and nectarines for me.  so many childhood memories trapped inside the juicy flesh.  i just need to take one bite and i'm transported back in time to endless summers of the mid-1980s!

and this was just a fun exercise in using up all the scraps and tiny bits of paper left over from bigger projects that i was just going to throw away.  sometimes inspiration can come from the trash! :)  i love the colors here on the left.  i used them as inspiration for the page on the right.

happy summer, everyone!  i'm still hanging onto the last bits.  school starts again soon.  but we will be enjoying summer-like weather well through october (i hope!  it's actually been quite a chilly summer so far!)