Artist @ work - SFX Writer's Festival

SFX Facebook Photo

I had a delightful time at SFX at their Writer's Festival.

As the Artist @ Work I spent my time finishing one of my Adventurous Chicken series illustrations, the Aerial Skiing Chicken.

The students I spoke to liked to draw or were interested in drawing but felt they weren't very good at drawing. So we talked about what they used to draw with, how I made my illustrations and that with regular practice you can improve your skills.

Canberra Children's Illustrators Group June Coffee & Pictures

Another wonderful catch up with my local group of children's illustrators. You all inspire me and I know that getting together gives each and everyone a creative lift to keep on illustrating or to get back to illustrating if things have been a bit slow creatively.

It was a delight to see two tiny little ones, Suzy's new baby and Iona's niece plus we met Catherine's larger child who was home from school getting over the last of his cold.

Our next meeting dates are still to be set as I am working on my diary dates as I really want to get to Melbourne to see the MoMA exhibition at the NGV. The 1st will be an impromptu one during the school holidays and the 2nd will probably a Sunday arvo in  August.

My Practice Inspired by the Sketchbook Revival

Frenetic
Fun
Fabulous
Freeing

These four words are what I would use to describe my experience of the 2018 Sketchbook Revival: An Online Workshop created by Karen Abend.

It was quite a task to complete the 24 workshops that ran for two official weeks - with a 2 week catch up period. Each day there were two sessions to learn new techniques and mediums from a range of artist's that work towards sketching daily. Each session's video length was around one hour, so on top of the viewing time I spent extra time stopping and starting the videos, following the process to create my own sketchbook pages.
See my sketchbook revival creations later in this post.

Reflection On Workshop

It is now a few weeks since I finished the workshops and I'm really pleased that I took the time to immerse myself in developing my craft's; skills and techniques. Many of the workshops aligned with other creative practices that I am currently following ie: The Artist's Way by Julian Cameron and the Jen Storer's, Scribbles online creative writing course.