Today has been one of those busy summer days, spent getting packed to go on another adventure! I’ll be leaving Friday to spend 5 Days teaching in sunny CA and I’m looking forward to spending time with my art buddies, Lisa Bebi and Renee Richetts.

During my packing however, I picked up the last issue of Cloth Paper Scissors to add to my stash of airplane reading material. As I flipped through it Serena Barton’s Workshop article again caught my eye-this was something I wanted to try. I had the good fortune to meet Serena at Art & Soul via Lesley Riley and we are going to be roomies for Art Unraveled in August and I love her work!

What I loved about this article is that Serena didn’t use any pencil-no sketching-just paint to paper, building shadows and highlights and eventually adding details with a brush.

I worked off an image on the art info cards I had made up. I liked the idea of turning this statue like face into a real person. I practiced looking at the little image I was modeling my painting after more than at what I was doing on the paper and as I was only doing this on a piece of paper I really wasn’t worried with how it would turn out. It’s just for practice.

So following Serena’s tutorial I spent about a half hour working in little spurts between packing. I tried to work fast and step away to look at if from a distance. I really wasn’t concerned about the outcome, just wanted to play with the process.

I liked the process, it’s different from how I usually work. I learned some things I can incorporate into the way I already paint and most of all I found just a little time to create art today.