Buildings

This week I found inspiration in my "Inspiration-File" on my computer. This is a place where I save things I really like or I want to try out myself. 
I think that this weeks page speaks for its own. 

"Buildings" wasn't as easy as I thought. But then I remembered the wooden building blocks of my childhood and how much I loved to play with them (so now you can guess my age). 

I cut templates out of cardboard and started to build my castle, as I did quite a while ago. I coloured the blocks with watercolour pencils, but didn't add water afterwards because it would habe diluted the "wooden" effect.

Abstract

I love the paintings of Wassiliy Kandinski. The theme "abstract" was the perfect opportunity to try something similar.

This week I found inspiration in Paul Klee. He did a painting once with this shapes which is called "Viaduct break ranks". 
I tried to give it a personal touch and I also wanted to try Gesso once. So I painted a black background and draw the viaducts with gel pens. 


Here is the orignal painting:

 Copyright: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSHsN-bjK40d_-AeGmIXPKST-R2KJVzZud5WV-C9QkfYYr2W6LPO1DWmucvEbkm7Ypdi1HRF2XwZyYR-2kkf0ojmFW-OeGVvGG8oNg4BXQqSl1l2W10XLp7-5oxYPQ5sIkQ7Dz37zlXCAm/s400/Paul-Klee-Viaducts-Break-Ranks.jpg

Green

This weeks word was easy for me. I really like to take pictures and have a huge selection of photos. I looked through them and searched for my favourite green pictures. I found a lot. Some of them became part of this collage. 
I am extremly happy that I had so many pictures with flowers because I think those other colors make the green more shiny and lively. 

I decided to write the word "green" in many different languages and in different shades of green. 

For those interested here are the translations
green = english
grün = german
viridis = latin
grön = swedish
gronn = norwegian
zelená = czech
zelen = croatian
groen = dutch
berde = basque
verde = portugese
seleno = bulgarian
gron = danish
sabz = persian
yecil = turkish
zöld = hungarian
hijau = indonesian
groenn = islandic
chloros = greek
rangi ya majani = swahili
gwyrdd = walsh
uaine = gaelic
zielen = polish
xanh = vietnamese
hovy = guarani (a dialect of Paraguay)
midori = japanese
verda = esperanto
vihreä = finnish
vert = french
verde = spanish and italian
sélen = russian

Light

The first thing that came to my mind about this week's topic was drawing an exploration grid and draw things concerning light into the squares. Then it took me one whole week (6 days actually) to convince myself that I can draw all those things. I am not very proud of my drawing skills but I finally believed in myself and now I really like this page. 

This week I have learned a lesson:
Always believe in yourself. I am now convinced that I can draw.

When the word "light" came up I immediately thought of the moon. Which is a false image because we all know that the moon is not shining on its own, it is just a reflection of the sunlight. And still it is the only natural light availabe in the night. So why not stick to it.

I painted an acrylic background which gives a nice dark color (actually it is a dark purple) and an interesting texture. I printed a black and white image of the moon that I found on the Internet and colored it with a yellow pastel chalk that I applied to a piece of fabric and then rubbed onto the picture. I glued the moon to the background, cut the silhoutte of a tree out of black paper and glued this to the page.

Music

As music can be interpreted in so many ways I really had a hard time deciding what I wanted to do.

Eventually I cut four notes out of paper and did a collage with different pictures showhing music in many senses.

For the background I wanted to create a black page. I used water soluable crayons but as I applied the moisture the black faded into a dirty grey. Not so good! The lines for the notes were drawn with pitt pens in different colors.

I still like the journal page but would have prefered if the page would have stayed black.


This week I tried to collect ideas about the theme first and then start making the page.
I had quite a lot of ideas and I finally decided to do a kind of jazzy page. When thinking about Jazz music the first picture that comes to my mind is that of a smoky jazz club with dimmed light and saxophon music. Cliché, I know. So I looked for a picture of a saxophon player and found the one of Winston Marsalis. Then I thought about what kind of background I would like to do. Because I think that a picture should speek for itself I settled for different jazz lyrics.
To add a little color I draw many notes flying out of the saxophon some got lost on the page.

This week I am really proud of my page. I had an idea, thought about it for a day or two and then created a harmonious picture.

Tree

The word of the week was "Tree".
It was the first week of our challenge and I didn't do much thinking about what I was going to do. My first idea was to draw a hammock between two trees. Lying in a hammock reading a book is the ultimate symbol of peace, quietness and joy for me.
I used watercolor pencils for the tree, watercolor for the grass and tree structure and colored pitt pens for the hammock. The green of the grass was done with pastels. The ballons are first stamped and then colored.

I am quite happy with this first page but I really learned that I need to do more thinking about the project to be really satisfied or even proud of my work.



When the word "tree" came up I knew immediately that I wanted a poem about a tree and then create something around this poem.
I searched the internet for quite a while but found only two poems that I kind of liked. And then I discovered the words from a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, where he tells him about the colors of the olive trees.
I looked at the pictures of van Gogh's olive trees and tried to paint the tree as he did with gnarled branches and small brush strokes for the clustered leaves. I used acrylic paints.

Hello!

Welcome! We are happy that you found our blog.

We are a team of two and we discovered art journaling a few months ago.
Since then we took two online courses and really got hooked.

So we decided to start a challenge. Each week we choose a word and each of us creates a page with this word as an inspiration.

Our goal is to get creative, use the different techniques we have learned and improve our skills.

Once a week we will post our pages so that you can see our different approaches to the theme.