New house, paint and watercolour Crayons...

A recent image I completed today. The text is a verse from a song by Gavin Sutherland. There are four verses, I want to illustrate each one. This week I acquired some watercolour crayons which I had never used before, but saw them for a good price and thought I'd try them out. They were really easy and nice to use. They are on par with watercolour pencil crayons, except are chunkier so it is easier to complete bigger areas faster. They are not as smooth as marker washes, which is what I do a lot of. I might try combining some crayon with marker washes and see if it's a good combination. I think the colour was slightly washed out in my scanned image, I could stand to up the colour a little in Photoshop. It's nice to have the time today to sit at my desk and do some art. I've been very busy lately with a lot of things, but namely that I bought a house, and got Posession last week! Here are few comments inspired by this recent purchase:


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The Sketchbook Project

I am pleased to announce that my sketchbook has made it to Brooklyn!! I submitted a sketchbook for ArtHouse coops 2011 sketchbook project. I have mentioned this project previously on the blog, and now the sketchbook has actually made it all the way to Booklyn where it will be catalogued and then it gets to travel the united states for about six months stopping at art galleries in Texas, Washington, Florida,California, Georgia, Illinois, and Maine.

It was a little sad for me to send it away and probably never see it again. However, it was also exciting for me to send my drawings away somewhere for strangers to look at.
The sketchbook project takes small moleskin sketchbooks from artists around the world (an astonishing 28838 artists were involved this year!) The sketchbooks tour galleries as a travelling exhitbit where people can take out my sketchbook as though it were a library book. At the end of the tour it will end up in Brooklyn where it will be a part of a permanent sketchbook library.
I have posted many of the drawings from the sketchbook on the blog over the past few months, but I felt the need to document the sketchbook before saying goodbye to it for good, so I did take a video of all the pages, and haven't decided yet if I should edit and upload it to youtube. I treated my sketchbook as a form of a visual jounal, and actually managed to keep my drawings all more or less in the same style throughout. It was a challenge to stick with a theme the whole sketchbook, but it was very satisfying in the end.
check out Art House coop and their other projects they have going on:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject

Oh and I had forgotten to actually promote my own website on my blog!
My online portfolio is up and running, though could still use a few tweeks perhaps.
www.juliamark.ca

The Sketchbook Project!!!

Today I received in the mail my new moleskin sketchbook for participation in the Sketchbook Project!! The sketchbook project is an initiative through Art House Co-op. The idea of the sketchbook project is that artists fill their sketchbooks, according to a chosen theme, send them back to the Art House, and then the sketchbooks tour galleries in the United States as a sketchbook library. The slogan for it is:

"It's like a concert tour but with sketchbooks."

The sketchbooks are made available for people to check them out like library books and then returned where they will be moved on to the next city. This is the fifth year the Sketchbook project is in existence and I am SO stoked to fill my sketchbook and send it off. The project deadline is mid-January.

Here is a good CNN video about the Project: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/04/27/barral.sketchbook.project.cnn?iref=videosearch