2026 - arting - quick art share

Anyone can join in.

Goals
1. Spend 5 or more minutes a day arting (drawing, painting, sculpture, garden, cooking, diorama, photography sewing, or whatever art gives you joy and you want to improve).
2. Share here when you can for extra love from the community to help motivate you.

No pressure scheduled, share when you can.

First pastel

Yuzu pastel experiment

Life keepa getting in the way.  It was supposed to take one hour.

I hate the composition.
Painting is a failure, but I want to finish to see what I can learn

My sons art

I lost heart in the painting early.  But I experimented with removing unwanted elements.

Composition practice
Or what shall I do with too many yuzu?

Our cat has done a chunk of damage to this chair. It has antique silk upholstery so I want to save what I can of it.
(As usual, an auction score,  so we're only in a couple of dollars on it but it is pretty and comfortable so its worth the work)

I've picked out a selection of coordinating fabrics from the stash and just made templates of the arm and back pieces. (I'd have a bolt of this fabric so it makes a great base)
I'm planning on doing overlapping patches from the mixed fabrics with stichwork and possible embroidery on to the templates to make the repair patches.
Then I only have to sew down 3 pieces total to the actual chair.

And I thought the orange would brighten against the duller background

Blue helps

I have been trying hard to spend a few minutes each day working from a children's drawing manual. My goal is to train my hand first, so I can then work on training my eye to tell my hand what it wants it to do. Will it work - who knows - but it won't hurt!

I am using a very nice 2B pencil and that seems to be helping a lot.

For inspiration, I am also reading through Nick Neddo's The Organic Artist.  Amazing how some simple instructions can help give me confidence. I would never have guessed that heating the shafts of feathers in sand would be an important step in making a quill pen? I have a small collection of large feathers from some of my birds, but I'm hoping the fellow talks about making organic ink before I put time into feathers!

I've gone through the scrap/small pieces stash and taken stuff that I think will go together and with the chair.

Still have to iron it all since that will make the patching nice and smooth.

(Several years ago, the Stratford Festival donated a ton of fabric scraps and remnants to our local store.  We got a bunch of those bags on clearance so have some really nice scrap bits)

Bored with this now

Setting up a still life.  Still too complicated but wll look amazing when the candle is lit

Some days one just has to draw a chicken

The book I mentioned above has a section on making homemade paint brushes. I don't have any animal hair that I think would be suitable, nor do we have any long leaved Pine trees - just short firs leaves.

However I do have a collection of flight feathers from ducks and geese. I was wondering if the barbs from the feather would stand in for the hair? Has anyone tried this or read anything suggesting it won't work?

Limited palette experiment.  Hen in oils colour unfinished

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I've started roughing out the base of patches on the back panel. I'm trying to leave extra on the top edge for sewing it to the chair.
Also don't want the texture too interesting on the top edge to hopefully decrease the cats interest in clawing it up again

We've had better weather this week, and a puzzle that was blocking the table from other tasks, so I've not done well with the drawing practice.

However, a friend brought me a small, rectangular metal box from candies. Today I pruned out a branch from my mulberry bush in the field. Wanting to take seriously the advice to peel the wood sooner rather than later, I did so right away, cutting it to lengths that fit the box as I went. I ended up with 14 pieces which should be enough to share.

I will double check, but I recall the book suggested letting the pieces dry for a week before trying to char them, so I'm back to "hurry up and wait"!

So maybe that's my cue to pull out my drawing pencil?

More colour studies

I make GreenMen in the winter from plants harvested in summer and autumn. This guy feels finished, but he doesn't have a proper name or a coat of sealant yet.

Matchbox Chili leaves & flowers

I think the fabric layout is mostly done. I've pulled a bunch of vintage ribbon from my grandparents stash that are in possible colours.
I still have to lay them out.

Got distracted and did a quick version of a bag style fron Anthropologie that I had seen.
We had a pair of vintage canvases that had no sentimental or $ value so I decided to try using them.
 (The stretchers they were on were the proper wood molding so they are being kept)

I had some acrylic gel medium so took them out and did a light coat on them to seal and stabilize them. They were left out to cure for a couple of days in the garage then cut.
I had a big bunch of leather colour samples we got for free. I pulled some to match the art and them laid out in colour blocks I liked the look of and sewed them into strips.
Then it was sewn up and I used a thrifted canvas belt from the stash.  (Our local thrift store used to do weekly clearance on older items so belts and ties would be 25 cents. I built up a supply collection)

I should get 3 bags total from the 2, 18×24 canvases.

I at least have the back piece for the chair repair together.
Not exactly as the layout but that is how it goes once you get sewing.

So, here are a few of my drawings.  Bare with me.  The green blob pic, it is supposed to be a color drawing of a tree stump covered in moss.  I may even have the actual pic somewhere on my phone.  I think I laughed for an hour after I finished it!!!  But I have been drawing for a few years now.  I get pretty good when I am consistent each week, several times a week or more.  But life gets in the way sometimes.  I hope you enjoy, and maybe get a good laugh with one or two.  Most are dated.  The one tree dated for 11/25 is actually drawn from a pic I took of an actual tree in a park near me.  For some reason, I can't draw something that is from a real object, but I can draw if it isn't from a specific object.   --Tess

I got the arm layouts done and have done the base sew downs for them as well.
It is so much easier to get it all to stay flat when they are smaller.
I made sure to put the actual upholstery fabrics over the spots where it had worn through so these should hold up better.
Now to do the detail sewing and then I have to start actually sewing them to the chair.

Maybe this counts as arting? For Christmas, I received an ink stone and ink stick. I decided two nights ago to try it out (since my Ancient History class will be learning about China). In my folly, I added too much water. Then I found out that the ink goes yucky if you don't use it all. I decided that meant I should try to learn Chinese calligraphy. I filled up three pages like this, because I didn't want to waste the ink I'd spent 15 minutes grinding!

Jay Angler wrote:The book I mentioned above has a section on making homemade paint brushes. I don't have any animal hair that I think would be suitable, nor do we have any long leaved Pine trees - just short firs leaves.

However I do have a collection of flight feathers from ducks and geese. I was wondering if the barbs from the feather would stand in for the hair? Has anyone tried this or read anything suggesting it won't work?

You can make fine brushes with the tips of feathers. Let me see if I can locate the video.... Ah-hah! Found it!

Oh! I forgot! I did art yesterday. I made a more historically accurate Pocahontas, and then colored her digitally:

trying to take the cartoon version and make her 10 years younger was not easy!

I'm hoping she looks enough like the movie version for kids to recognize her, while still being more accurate...and 10 years old.

I did some flower arrangements with dried plant materials from my garden. One is western bouquet in a bamboo ikebana bowl and the other is in minimalism style with self made vase.

OT - sorry, but I had to ask...

May Lotito wrote:I did some flower arrangements with dried plant materials from my garden.

Does that mean that you've got Lotus growing? ( Nelumbo nucifera ) I managed to start one from seed once, but we're just too cold for it to reliably grow here, let alone bloom. In my dreams, I'd love a large enough greenhouse that I could grow some of these marginal plants.

I also happen to adore Lotus root as a baked veggie and it's terribly hard to find locally. A friend of mine found some once and had it on the menu when I was visiting and she was surprised I recognized it, because it's so uncommon here.

Yes, in Japan, flower arranging is considered a valuable skill and highly respected art form. I learned a little while I was there, but not enough to tackle it.

The arm patches are all assembled.  I used the ribbons to cover the edges most likely to fray. It was also nice to use up some of my grandmother's supply stash.

Now I get to start the actual attachment.

Jay Angler wrote:OT - sorry, but I had to ask...
Does that mean that you've got Lotus growing? ( Nelumbo nucifera )

Yes, I have a flowering variety for the petals (tea), seeds (edible when young) and seed heads. I also grow a non-flowering type for edible roots. I do have to dig up rhizomes for overwintering indoors. According to Judith, it's easy to sprout and grow: https://permies.com/p/3161635 It's a versatile plant if kept contained.
Other plants used above are: cockscomb, stonecrop, broomcorn and iris.

Mapping out a composition study with pan pastels.  It's like eyeshadow for paper.

The book I read about natural art got me wanting to experiment with natural equipment. I will suggest that videos and books make it look easier than it is... but if I practice, I expect that like the simple drawings* I've been doing, I will improve.

So yes, goose feathers can be cut to make paintbrushes! And I have a small collection of feathers from when my geese have molted (obviously I should have saved more, but this is a yearly event and a renewable resource.)



The instructions from two spots, said to cut the feather, so that one side could be rolled into a good point - they made it sound easy. They lied...



It is possible that a little shaping with sharp scissors will help, but I'm inclined to try using it first and trimming it as I see what effects I'm getting.

The book I had been reading ( https://permies.com/wiki/70531/Organic-Artist-Nick-Neddo ), talked about looking for a stick and whittling it to the right shape for a paint brush handle. We're back into rain that limits my outdoor time to higher priorities, and my kitchen drawer has a few of those lovely, Canadian made, "disposable" chopsticks that I like to find better uses for than landfill or kindling.  It was a perfect match!



*drawing hint - I'm doing much better using a 2B pencil than the typical HB pencil. I think it reduces my need to push harder to make a darker mark, so I'm more relaxed, giving me more flowing lines.

When we made them five years ago (thread here), my kids actually realized that the tip of another feather fit quite nicely as a handle:



I actually brought some feathers into my history class (we've been learning about the Renaissance) and showed them how to make paint brushes. They were really into it and all wanted to make their own. I sadly didn't have enough feathers to go around, as my goose hasn't molted yet. (And the other feathers I'd saved up were all used up by the class to make feather dusters...)