My first attempt at Lesson 2 "Painting with Abstract Lines" from the online class I'm taking at:
http://www.carlasonheim.com/elements-building-blocks-of-painting/

Watercolor, charcoal, acrylic paint, and colored pencil on watercolor paper.

Watercolor/sketch

I drew this?

Do you ever find old drawings/doodles that you don't even remember doing?  I found this one tonight. It's actually a digital collage I made from a bunch of separate doodles. I found all the separate drawings too. I don't have any memory of this! I can recognize that it's my drawing, but I totally don't remember the collage at all. I guess if I live long enough, everything will be new again.

The Mask I Wear - Art class assignment

Art class assignment - Make a newspaper collage from a black and white photograph

Title: The Mask I Wear

I used a photo of myself that I took a couple months ago. I chose the pose in which I was wearing a mask to convey that my true self is hidden from the world. Also the mask in the photo is covered in cut up book pages so I thought that it would work well and be easy to translate later for the newspaper collage piece.

I found that I really struggled with creating the collage. It was quite time consuming and the textual mask that I thought would be so easy to recreate with newspaper was very difficult for me. I didn't have enough black newsprint to recreate the very solid black area of hair so I printed out a solid black piece of paper on my printer and used that to make a cut out for the hair. I rubbed an eraser around the printed paper to rub off some of the toner, giving it a texture more in line with the newsprint. The very hardest part was translating the lips in the collage piece, I finally had to give up trying to create them solely from paper and used a marker to draw in the shapes. I then expanded my use of the marker to outline the mask and eye holes to tie the image together.

I think what I most wanted to try to suggest with this piece is that we all wear a mask. We hide behind masks of behavior, gestures, words... only letting bits and pieces of our true selves show through in certain social situations. I don't think anybody ever reveals the whole of themselves to the world, we are all guarded and masked. It's how we survive.

Cinquain Collage

I am trying to organize files on my computer and I came across this old collage/poem I had completely forgotten about.