watch it grow

On Facebook I’m a member of a very nice Dutch creative group called JOOK’S Kunst Café. People post their art, there are ATC swaps and every once in a while the founder Joke organizes an event. In april there was such an event again and I decided to jump in:

“It’s time for another multi-day challenge and this time we’re going for 10 days. Personally, I think a slightly larger sheet of paper, canvas or a piece of wood is the most suitable to work on for these 10 days. We enter the process completely blank and work on 1 work of art for 10 days with the help of assignments.

Take, for example, a quarter of an hour of ME-time every day (longer is of course also possible) and apply something to your base based on the assignment I post. (…) In addition to the assignments, it is of course also the intention to show your own input. During the “Assignment days” there can also be “DO YOUR OWN THING” days.

It will probably happen sometimes that you have to paint or paste over something because there is no empty space left. But that’s part of these kinds of challenges (the well-known “letting go”).
At the end of the ride you will be amazed at what you’ve created (that’s my experience).

I hope for many participants.
XXX Joke”

I had a blank canvas laying around and took that to work on. (click to enlarge the image)

During those 10 days, these assignments came up:

Assignment 1: Cover your surface COMPLETELY with STRIPS of leftover paper ~ I used (failed) gelli prints cut into strips

Assignment 2: Cover your work with a wash of diluted acrylic paint or gesso ~ in my case I diluted the background with white acrylic paint

Assignment 3: Use paint in the color of the clothes you are wearing today… write (un)readable text through it with a white or black pen ~ I turned my canvas and used old pink paint (see photo of my lounge pants.) With a thin ‘tube’ (what’s that thing called? A bottle with a very thin spout.) of diluted black acrylic paint I wrote text, these are sentences from the song “Time” by Pink Floyd.

Assignment 4: Use a napkin or tissue paper ~ piece of napkin in the lower left corner

Assignment 5: Paste half an image and draw the other half yourself ~ photo from a fashion magazine, supplemented/drawn by me.

Assignment 6: DO YOUR OWN THING! ~ A added a tiny bit of ochre yellow in the bottom right corner and I tuned down the white in the middle by painting it a bit grayer with diluted paint.

Assignment 7: Use one or more stencil(s) with paint/structure paste ~ I brought back the white with a dotted stencil and white acrylic paint.

Assignment 8: Grab a magazine, find some nice, sharp or crazy texts and stick them randomly on your work ~ I flipped through “National Geographic” magazines to find text that fits with the songtext that I wrote earlier.

Assignment 9: Make marks with e.g. a brush, marker, card and/or doodle and/or make nice lines on your work with a pen. ~ I applied thin, black lines with a credit card in the bottom right corner.

 

Assignment 10: Finish your work, dot the i’s and cross the t’s as you like. ~ I called my canvas finished after assignment 9 because I actually had nothing more to add, I think it’s fine the way it is. Here’s the end result

If you have the opportunity to participate in challenges like these, do it. It gets you out of your comfort zone and gets the inspiration flowing. This challenge got me out of the journals and on to a canvas and you know what? This is the first canvas I created that I really like!