Summer Creative Retreat: Inspiration Treasure Hunt

Last year, I took six classes during The Pigeon Letters Summer Creative Retreat. (This one was my favorite. Or maybe this one.) Summer Creative Retreat is billed as the world's biggest free online art event, with 60 classes and over 20, 000 people attending. I really enjoyed it last year and was eager to participate again. Unfortunately, I didn't get home from Idaho until this year's Summer Creative Retreat was half over, and then I had to do all those annoying things like laundry, groceries, bills, and catching up with work that come after a trip. I did manage to watch four of the classes on replay before the event ended and I crafted along with two of them. 

The first was Inspiration Treasure Hunt: A Playful Process for Creating Art, by Mel Rye. 

Mel began by asking us to go on an Inspiration Treasure Hunt to find random objects on our workspace. We looked carefully at the items we found to discover shapes and textures. For example, a simple pencil has a round eraser that might inspire dots, a metal ferrule with vertical lines, and a wavy pattern where the pencil was sharpened. 

We used the shapes we found to doodle the shapes they inspired onto plain paper. It was fascinating how many different patterns I was able to make using found items sitting on my desk. I did most of my doodles with a ballpoint pen, then switched to a Sharpie in order to get darker shapes for contrast. After creating a bunch of patterns, we cut those apart and arranged them on a colorful background. As you can see in the graphic above, Mel made abstract designs. I made fruit. The watermelon, pear, and apple each use three different patterns and the pineapple has two, so there are 11 different doodles represented below. 

This was a really fun activity and a great way to stretch creatively. It's something you could do anywhere, since it uses so few materials. Such a fun class!

Crayon Melt State Fruits: Pear, Peach, Strawberry, Watermelon, and Tomato

It's been almost four years since I've pulled out the warming tray to do a crayon melt project. I'm surprised it's been that long, since it's one of my favorite techniques. I love the painterly effect it gives on these, each of which is an official state fruit.  

Pears are the state fruit of Oregon. 

Peaches are the state fruit of Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. (Technically, peaches are Alabama's state tree fruit.)

Strawberries are the state fruit of Delaware, Louisiana, North Carolina (technically, the state red berry), and Oklahoma.

Tomatoes are the state fruit of Arkansas, Ohio, and Tennessee.

OK, I lied. Watermelon is not a state fruit. It is the state vegetable of Oklahoma. If you think a tomato should be considered a vegetable and watermelon a fruit, don't take it up with me. Botanically, tomatoes are fruit and so are watermelons, but Oklahoma has valid arguments for considering watermelon a vegetable. 

I didn't make crayon melts of all of the state fruits. Others include oranges, apples, huckleberries, blackberries, plums, blueberries, grapes, cranberries, chokecherries, grapefruit, cherries, and pawpaws. Feel free to make those, or anything else, using the technique below. The materials list includes affiliate links. 

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Crayon Melt State Fruits

Materials:

• warming tray
• white paper
• crayons
• microtip scissors
• craft glue

Steps:

Plug in the warming tray. and put a sheet of paper on top. Scraps are perfectly ok. Use crayons to color in the fruits you'll be making. You can blend and layer colors as much as you want. 

I recommend removing the wrappers from the crayons and laying them on their sides for faster, more even coverage. When you do that, you're going to get wax that transfers to the crayon, but that's not a problem. Here you can see that I put the white crayon into an area I'd colored dark green, which blended and transferred to the crayon. To clean it off, just color on a clean area of paper. 

You have two choices when adding details to your project. For the watermelon seeds, I just dotted black crayon directly onto the hot red wax. Since the black shows up really well on red, this is a good option. 

If I'd tried to add the yellow strawberry seeds on top of the red wax while it was hot, they would have blended in too much. Instead, I removed the strawberry, let it cool completely, cut out my shape, then returned it to the warming tray for just long enough to warm up. Then I was able dot on little bits of yellow. 

Don't forget to color the stems and leaves that you'll be using on your fruits. When you've colored everything, unplug the warming tray and let the wax set. Then cut out the shapes using scissors. Glue the leaves and stems to the appropriate fruit. Have fun!

Let's Paint Skill Builders: Painting a Pear

I love to paint but I don't really know what I'm doing, which is why I absolutely LOVE the Let's Paint videos by Plaid. I've been sharing the Let's Paint Live paintings I've done, but I wanted to introduce you to the Let's Paint Studio Lessons. The Studio Lessons include monthly projects and weekly Skill Builders. They are so helpful for people like me who are looking to learn the basics.

This week, I watched the Painting a Pear Skill Builder. Here's my finished pear:

There's plenty of room for improvement, but I learned a lot and am happy with my first attempt. And while part of my goal was to improve my painting skills, I had a secondary motivation to do some painting: to test out my new heat gun. 

My friends at Wagner sent me the Studio Precision Heat Gun (affiliate link) and I'm happy to say it worked perfectly! There are a lot of places within the video where you have to pause and wait for the paint to dry; instead, I just gave it a quick zap with the heat gun and I was able to move right on. What a time-saver! Here I am in the middle of the project. In retrospect, I should have done a posed photo so that the heat gun wouldn't be blurry, but I'm nothing if not authentic. The heat gun was going as I snapped the photo with my bad hand!

Now that I have a heat gun, I'm sure that I'll come up with all sorts of ways to use it. Although honestly, if I never use it for anything other than speeding up the time it takes paint to dry, it'll still be totally worth it!