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, 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.