Letter

We are here again!
Sorry for the long delay!

Our challenge for this week was "a letter". I took the letter G. My inspiration were the first letters of a chapter in old books. They are big and heavily ornamented. My letter did not turn out this way - it looks more like a G with a lot of doodeling. But nevertheless I'm rather happy with it.

I tried two different approaches this week and I couldn't decide which one to show on the blog. So I will show you both. 
My first page was a grid were I thried out how various letters look and then colored them. 

My second page is just a single letter which I tried to decorate with climbing roses. Good intention but it looks more like some string of light attached to the M, which is good also. I am just glad that it looks good. I wasn't sure about that when I drew it. 

Window

We are so so sorry. Because of a huge amount of work we didn't have the time to do our weekly challenges for quite a long time. 

Even this week only I found the time to do the window for our challenge. 
I found inspiration in my pictures I took in Italy. I really like those window or door pictures one can find in so many calenders. So I started to take pictures of windows and doors I liked instead of buying the expensive calenders.

This one is inspired by a window I found in Siena, Tuscany. 

Next week everything will be back to normal and we will both be posting our pictures. At least we hope so.

Spring

As I walk my dog everyday in the woods I see spring coming. There are more and greener leaves on the trees and on the ground every day and although the trees seem bare there are green leaves and flowers everywhere. On a sunny day I took my camera with me and tried to capture this feeling. There is a large picture with seemingly bare trees but on the close-ups one can see that there are a lot of tiny white flowers on the ground and fresh green leaves on the trees.

I had an immidiate idea what to do with the word "spring". When I was a kid I had the wonderful book "Big Bird brings spring to Sesame Street". Poor Big Bird is fed up with snow and winter and buys six wonderful flowers to put in his nest. During his walk home he gives all the flowers to friends in Sesame Street. So he brings spring to it because there are these beautiful colored flowers everywhere. I really really wanted to do something with the story of this book. I read it again - it is still so lovely - and started to look up the different flowers on the internet. Then I came across this photo of "Prismatic Spring" in Yellowstone National Park. I was there in 1998 and it was so amazing. I really recommend going there. 
I printed this photo and glued it on a black gesso background. I also rubbed this photo with purple pastels to get a more extraordinary look. I hope you can see it on the picture (I think you can see it in the left corner).  

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.