1st Kate Crane Art Journal class at AFTH

I have been excited about my first class at Art From The Heart since I booked it over a month ago, and the day finally arrived yesterday. Kate had only just come back from Ranger U the day before, and what a trooper she was to take on a class with mahoosive jetlag. You would never had known it though, she was bright eyed and bushy tailed raring to go.

We started off drawing an image from a magazine without looking at what we were drawing, but just looking at the image in the mag. Then we drew the first thing that came to mind without taking our pencil/pen off the page, try drawing a face without taking the pen or pencil off the page, it gets tricky drawing a nose and eyes, and mouth! 

Then we drew faces using our non-dominant hand (left for me) with a paint brush on a Yellow Pages, page. This was really fun and I think was my favourite exercise too. Then we filled in the face with gesso & paint using our dominant hands. I love the way this turned out. My Son said this was a freaky painting and I like that.

We carried on our limbering up exercise by drawing as many different shaped houses as we could think of.

Then we drew whatever came to mind and this freaky deaky dude was the result.

Then Kate suggested drawing a head a bit differently on tissue paper, she showed us an example of a head similar to this in her journal so I did one too. We coloured it using distress inks, water spray and a brush. We then looked for a background page in our journals, stuck the tissue down and made a page from it. I drew a body direct on the page and wrote "Am I in or out of my depth?" with a dip pen and Indian ink.

I think the story behind the page was I was sat in Dyan Reaveley's studio with Kate Crane errrmmm! Need I say anymore??

I went out this afternoon and bought this lovely lot as I enjoyed writing with the dip pen and the Indian Ink so much. Thanks a gazillion Kate, I had the best time ever!

This was my little haul from Art From the Heart yesterday. Two wondrously inspiring books by Katie Kendrick and Kelly Rae Roberts, 4 stencils (I'm addicted to them!), a small black suede journal, a Delish biscuit book and an awesome Ranger apron, hell yeh, love em all.

I have just pinched this pic from Kate's Facebook page of our class yesterday. I'm behind the white wire with the blue top on. Boy what fun I had.