water color – Rae Nudson

I am into words. I am an editor, I love to read, and I believe you need to write clearly to convey your ideas even if you’re not a writer or an editor.

But words aren’t the only way to share your story. As I’ve seen with The Sandman and all the other graphic novels I’ve recently started to read–not to mention every museum, photograph, or artwork everywhere–pictures and images are just as valuable storytelling devices.

I want to use images to tell my stories, too. So I’ve been checking out sketching and fashion illustration, and this weekend I got to play around with watercolors. I started with this really cool sketchbook that has all the figures already on the page. It’s called The Fashion Sketchpad, and I saw it first on this post by A Beautiful Mess that talks about fashion sketching. I’d like to keep practicing and draw the figures on my own, but for now it’s a great way to get started. I started by sketching some looks from the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. (Please forgive my weird mannequins, I’m working faces/hair/etc. Well, I’m working on all of it.)

I also tried some looks from Fashion Week. Here’s some from Kate Spade and Prabal Gurung.

I sketched directly on top of The Fashion Sketchpad’s figures, but I’d like to experiment more with using actual watercolor paper. I also love this idea for drawing interiors.

I have a lot more practicing to do, but I am excited about what sketching and painting can do!

I went home for the holidays, along with my siblings, their significant others, and their kids. My dad told us this week that we had a few projects to do before we could leave town. It would be like summer camp, he said. But for Christmas.

Christmas Camp started with family breakfasts where we learned to make southern biscuits and a book club meeting (more on that later). But one of the coolest things we did all week was a water color blob inspired art project.

We started with a wall filled with paintings of blobs of color. My dad made them for us, he said, so that we could use ink to draw on the painting whatever image we saw in the blobs–kind of like spotting images in clouds. He had some examples.

We each had to complete one drawing and put it back on the wall before the week ended. Well, we got a little carried away. One was just not enough. Soon we ran out of blobs and starting making more.

We used water colors, added some salt for texture, or used a straw to blow the paint for streaks of color–anything was fair game to get colors twisted and turned in juuuust the right way.

We had so much fun. It was so interesting to see what our family came up with, and everyone from grandkids to grandparents all participated. Here are some of my favorites. Don’t forget to sign your masterpiece!