Art Club #4

This art club we had record attendance!! We are now exhibiting 10 works on our board, with a further four people asking for their work to be left out of the display. That makes 14 active members of the art club, including ourselves the organisers. I was extremely pleased not only with the turn-up to the club, but also the wonderful work produced by its members! We decided, through feedback and our own personal ideas, to try a landscape today, to open up new genres and new techniques too.

We also decided watercolour is most appropriate for the sort of grey, watery day that we were going to depict. Even though the weather was nice today (considering we had sunlight and positive temperatures), it was still pretty bleak. However, we made use of the good weather and sent everybody outside to sketch a scene in pencil, setting a time limit of 20 minutes to prevent everybody from turning into a popsicle. Then we went back in, and proceeded to apply the washes of watercolour. We are generally pretty lax about drawing styles and do not specifically encourage realism, so the degree of imagination that was applied to the work was very pleasing, with a huge diversity of styles being represented in the work. I was also inspired, by pen drawing I had done the day before for fun, to encourage them to later add an overlay of black ink pen to the contours to make it bolder and just give it a different feel. I myself did this, as did many others, but I felt that the majority wanted to simply perfect their watercolours, so did not push it on them.

The idea that I had originally had, to have a wood burning station which one person could work at as an alternative to the main activity, was not as successful as I had anticipated it would be. We took all necessary safety precautions when setting it up, ensuring flammable materials were well out of proximity, but the wood samples I had brought simply weren't soft enough to allow easy gliding of the instrument, even after I had let it heat up past the recommended temperature. The main reason however, was that people were just too engaged in the main activity to want to do something else, which outweighed all the disappointment of the failed wood burning.

Here are some pictures of the end results, all of which I find incredibly unique and beautiful in their own right

The finished board, taking into account individual requests for exclusion
of work from the board

Here a dramatic sunrise is the backdrop for a volleyball net
and black bin bags. Symbolic?

Jessica's was the most free interpretation of the landscape theme
and yet is one of my favourite results. Reminding me of "The
Scream", it is hugely effective at capturing emotion

This symmetrical composition uses very interesting
overlays of close-up leaves

Martha decided to use re-colour the drab facades of
the nearby buildings

.

Arvidas decided to deviate from the assigned subject matter,
but that's fine with the club policy

My artwork incorporates both human element and
landscape features

An impressionistic style was adopted by this artist

Alisa's drawing style continues over a
range of genres

Pauline directed focus to a single tree,
 capturing the downcast weather perfectly

Norbert's bright, carefree tree stands tall
like the symbol of a perfect autumn day

Katarina chose to focus on the human aspect of a landscape