Co-Lab II

My yoga and painting buddy Doris and me – we are having another exhibition coming up in May. Our first LoveLights show is still hanging beautifully and for our new show at a fancy hairdresser’s we also want to some of our collaborative paintings. We had another painting session last weekend. It was a warm and wonderful spring afternoon, so we could move out from Doris studio space into my garden.

My daughters happily joined (who can resist acrylic paint?) inside and outside the house. This time our painting process was even more loose and playful – we switched between four to five paintings all the time, but there were no time limits, you just painted as long as you wanted on a piece.

A perfect painterly afternoon.

Apr192015May 9 2015

Pattern 16/52

As you might have noticed by now, I am quite addicted to online art courses. Addicted is probably not the right word – e-courses are just such a gift of modern technology. You can learn from top artists and teachers, be part of a supportive worldwide online community and have some schedule and assignments to keep you motivated and for structuring your creative time.

This week Module 3 of ABSPD (The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design) started. I took Module 1 in October last year and Module 3 in January and I can see and feel how my designs have evolved and how much I have learned all along the surface pattern way.

This is another 5-week-intensive course and there is only one problem for me now – making time for art and designing. I am teaching more yoga classes at the moment and then there is the usual family bustle. So it’s all about finding small windows of time. We were given an assigment for designing 6 patterns for a giftwrap – non floral and non organic, please! Everything else was possible, geometric, ornate, abstract, textural. For late 30’s affluent female customers (would that be me?).

I went for textural and made some textures with black acrylic paint in my studio.

The finished giftwrap collection came together in Photoshop and Illustrator (in the wee hours of Saturday morning). I wanted to keep it loose, free and playful.

These are all placement prints, but could be made into repeating patterns easily. I am warmed up now for the coming weeks of pattern designing.

Apr192015May 6 2015

Pink Moment of the Week

oh, how I love magnolias!

Apr152015May 19 2015

Cosmic Telephone & Fingernails

I have already painted on a round canvas board this year and now I grabbed an oval one.

the finished painting is called: “cosmic telephone: call me”

The painting is influenced by a lesson in Alena Hennessy’s A Year of Painting 2, encouraging the use of black & white for classy elegance – but you can see, there is still a bit of pink in the upper left corner, from one layer that was a pink background. The collage circles are again from Indian paper bought in Amsterdam.

Speaking of classy elegance, I never paint my fingernails. But in another e-course that I am taking right now, Module 3 of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, one exercise was to design a pattern for fingernails! I had just finished the painting and had fun digitally applying it in Illustrator:

Apr142015May 6 2015

Oh my Goddess!

A new collage called “triple goddess”.

I usually have a couple of backgrounds on rotation in my studio. I put leftover paint on them, stencil stuff or start collages. They keep evolving over a couple of weeks and sometimes months, with some changes every now and then. And I rarely have an idea how they will turn out. This was such a background. Glueing on some circles from Indian paper bought in Amsterdam made all the difference in this piece, some white paint pen work on top (while working in the kitchen) and I felt ii coming together. I love my work to surprise me.

Apr122015May 9 2015

Pattern 15/52

This week’s pattern is again a by-product of the Make Art that Sells course Part B, its 5th and final week was dedicated to Party Paper – paper plates, napkins, paper cups, wrapping paper etc. Our inspiration – the mini – was Bavarian and Ukrainian folk art. Ok, I am half-German (but not Bavarian) and half-Russian (but not Ukrainian), so this had something of a homey feel. But – I wasn’t at home at all, we were on our family trip in Amsterdam during most of the week. The good thing is, inspiration is everywhere. And the mini warm-up exercise gave me some kind of tunnel vision in the back of my head (if that’s the right term) for our time in easy-going Amsterdam. You can see my inspiration from what I brought home from Amsterdam. The latest Dutch edition of Flow magazine had a great folksy illustration by Uzbekistan-born Dinara Mirtalipova in it and I remembered having seen her work in the German Flow magazine as well. Folk art is a lot about flowers and birds and the idea for the birds came flying to me while seeing the Matisse exhibition with this paper cutouts. Let’s try a Matisse-inspired folk art thing! I took some coloured paper with me from the children’s corner as I wanted to bring some original Amsterdam flavour home, plus a limited colour palette can be such a liberation also. My mind was set.

Back at home I started the manifestation.

All my cutouts. And then I started glueing. A bit scary, so final. Here is the paper plate.

Over the course of the first day back at home I glued together this plate, a napkin and a cup. And then I scanned them all in and brought them into Photoshop for final tweaks and presentation.

As the “fairy art mother” of the MATS courses Lilla Rogers says, you can reuse the art and icons for one market for other markets. And I did that for another upcoming Spoonflower contest “Flowers for Mom Border Print” – a floral border print design for Mother’s Day. Here – at last, if you made it that far – comes my pattern of the week “Amsterdam in April”:

And tested on an apron template (the template comes from Jenna Frye’s Skillshare class “Introduction to Surface Design: Creating And Mixing Patterns”, that you could watch for free this week):

Looks pretty Dutch, doesn’t it?

You can enter the contest until Tuesday, April 28th. Voting will open on Thursday, April 30th.

Apr112015May 9 2015

New Layers

I finished a painting this week, on a 1m x 1m canvas (40” x 40”). I don’t know how many layers this painting has (seven or more), I started it in October last year and I found every layer so uninteresting that I didn’t even care to take photographs of the painting in progress. And then after one whirlwindy afternoon painting session – it clicked.

“maybe tonight”

Apr52015May 9 2015

Easter Sunday

Happy Easter everyone!

Apr42015May 9 2015

Pattern 14/52

The pattern of the week is the result of the work I did in Week 3 of the MATS B course. The market was scrapbooking – something that took me a while to grasp. There is no such market in Germany (yet), but we were provided with lots of information and visuals in the class to get an understanding of it. The other thing was the topic – airships, also known under the funny names of dirigibles and blimps. This also took a while for me to get going – or in the creative language – get sketching. Drawing technical details with my regular pens wasn’t too much fun for me. When we got the assignment, to make a vintage-correspondence-themed scrapbooking page incorporating airships, I had an idea – old-school pen & ink. Lilla Rogers always encourages to try new things in our art and I hadn’t drawn with a real nib since my school days.

And then there was no stopping me. This was the week I put the most time into an assignment. It was Friday and the deadline was Sunday evening and I was about to go to an ashram to teach a weekend prenatal yoga immersion. I worked on the train and in-between my yoga classes and instead of attending collective yoga ashram chanting.

I wanted to give my piece a watercolour feel and used digital watercolour swatches from Nicky Latz for it.

My laptop had quite a hard time saving all those bits, but in the end I had a final page:

One more good thing after all this (pleasurable) work – Spoonflower had an upcoming contest “Flying machines” and I could reuse my icons to assemble a repeating pattern:

If you like my pattern, you can vote for it and as many others that you like here.

Thank you!

Apr42015May 9 2015

Hello April!

Due to our Amsterdam adventure a couple of days later – here is Clara’s April page:

Spring is officially here now –

let the lovebirds sing!