Magic beans...

Last week I jumped into Mindful Art Studio's  Slow Drawing Patterns challenge with a sharpie pen, small pieces of watercolor paper, and a simple little child's paint palette.  I'm using this palette because I was too impatient to go looking for a larger set  of tubed  watercolor paints I bought once upon a time.  Most of my art supplies are leftovers from when our boys were young.  It has taken me too long to start playing with them all by myself!  

Turns out I'm glad I'm using these paints as it's interesting to see what colors I can make with such a limited palette.   Every Wednesday a drawing prompt is given, with some basic instructions to let the pen go where it take you (or something like that), and participants are told to interpret the prompt and their own drawings however they like.

The shape is described by the instructing artist as "Peguin" so penguins are, of course, the first place my very literal brain wants to go.  But the shape below looked more like a bean, so I drew some cartoony vines and tendrils to go with it.  I'm no artist, so imagine how happy I was to make what appear to be the beans inside a dried up pod.  You may see something else, or nothing at all, but my interpretation of this picture is a dried up bean pod hanging onto its shriveling plant in late October.

The impression of  beans was made by using a clean wet brush to lift off some of the green/yellow/brown paint.  I just moved the brush on its side in a circular fashion as I pressed into the paint, then lifted the brush while still moving it round, and like magic, that created the edges of bean bumps and some lightening of the color in such a way that the bean shape looks kind of dimensional.  No one else may be impressed, but I couldn't have done better if I'd tried to actually paint something that looked beans.

That's it for today!  Just something fun I'm up to recently so it's game for a "Daily Life Photo".  

Thanks for popping in!