Life Book Class Eight - Play!

This week's class is being taught by Mystele who teaches classes on her own Ning site, too. http://littleglimpsesstudio.ning.com/ I've taken a couple of classes from her before, and love what she does. Her style is "gut" art. In this week's videos, she is calling it "pulled" art. She had us start out by writing words, phrases, or whatever we were thinking on a blank page of water color paper. Then she had us paint and collage over it. The whole idea is not to begin with a preconceived idea of what you are going to paint. Once you have created the background, you keep looking at it until you find some object, person, symbol or whatever, and you start the painting and play by going with that. Mystele's paintings are very folk-artsy, and always colorful and a lot of fun to look at. As usual, my painting ended up pretty wild, but it definitely fits with what I wrote underneath it all. These Life Book assignments are also meant to be a type of journaling. Everything is done on 9 x 12 heavy water color paper. We are going to bind them all into a book at the end of the year. Wow! I'm going to have one crazy book! It will all be real mixed-media, too. That's very exciting to me since I've done so much digital art over the past years.