Pursuing Art in my Fifties

You all know by now that I have one daughter at uni doing illustration and visual communications (as a quick aside and proud mummy moment, Lillie achieved a first overall in her second year, which I believe contributes somewhat to her final grade next year). You can see her first art exhibition raising money for teenage mental health and second, which explored Compassion on London buses where she focused on giving up seats for disabled people, I also have another daughter who is artistically skilled in a whole different way (see below), and wants to study fashion at the same university in a couple of years. Bemoaning the fact that I did not go to art university myself, I have decided henceforth that I shall focus on pursuing art in my fifties!

Pursuing Art in my Fifties means that I want to progress in some way. I know I am able to paint fairly cute animals in a very Claire-like style, but I wonder if I can develop my skills. My girls have never had a formal art lesson. It is clear to see that both their skills way surpassed mine a long time ago. This tells me that it is not the quality of art lessons that has developed and improved their techniques. On reflection, I think it is the quantity of time they have spent working on areas of weakness and exploring different art medium. Time. With three of my five children completely independent and my two younger ones becoming ever more so, time is something of which I have.

Learning from the Girls

Whilst my daughters haven’t had art lessons from an actual artist, they have had me taking them through the qualifications they have done from photography, art and design, textiles, mixed media…you name it, we have probably done it. And what I have noticed is that at each stage the process is very similar regardless of whether the qualification is in art, textiles or photography and regardless of whether it is level 1, 2 or 3. In fact, Lil’s uni work follows pretty much the same process for each project. I am so familiar with this way of learning that I know that pursuing art in my fifties will look almost identical to my girls pursuing art in their teens.

Project-Based Learning

I am a huge fan of project based learning and independent learning. I do not think one has to work for a qualification to make that learning effective. In fact, the freedom to explore may be more accessible without the boundaries enforced by the specification requirements of a qualification. However, the general stages of the art process (which is reflected in the specification) can be a useful starting point.

The stages of the art process are as follows:

• Inspiration and Idea Generation
• Preparation
• Incubation and Exploration
• Evaluation and Refinement
• Execution and Completion

Pursuing Art in my Fifties: Project Based Learning

So, whilst I attempt to improve my art I will be following the above steps loosely. Each project starts with a word or topic. Sometimes there is a choice of words or topics. For example, my daughter had to explore three topics (Animals and their habitats, Sci-fi and Mythical Creatures) before choosing one to focus her mixed media on. As the levels increase the topics tend to become words, the more abstract the better. Level three art and design may include words such as circles, reflection or myself.

I chose my word which was ‘Unexpected’. It’s a little ambiguous and I thought it could give me a lot to explore. I have made quite a long video (for me) about the process of creating my first double spread for this project. I will link this video below. For the purpose of this post, I will go through it in writing 😊

Unexpected: Exploration of What Unexpected Means

First, I looked up ‘unexpected’ in the thesaurus to find lots of synonyms. Next, I googled unexpected art and found that surrealist art fell into this category nicely. I chose some art to pop into my sketch book, which I talk more about in the video below. Lastly, I used all the words I had found and wrote them repeatedly around the pictures of the art. Choosing my four favourite words, I write them in the box. It is these words I will use, alongside ‘unexpected’ to move forward with my project.

Mark-Making

I knew I wanted to learn a bit more about collage making a la Eric Carle. In order to do this, I’ve watched other artists play around with markmaking and then using their own marked paper for their collage. You can see both sides of the mark-making sheets below:

I tied the sheet into the middle of my double spread:

I used the mark-making to cut out the letters for the word ‘unexpected’ and stuck it backwards as a title (‘cos, y’know, that’s unexpected!)

Looking at Children’s Books

As my eventual goal is to illustrate my own simple children’s book, I have chosen two children’s books this week for inspiration, one for the colours and the other for the creativity. Again, I talk more about this in my video. I created a colour palette straight from ‘The Baby Who Wouldn’t Go To Bed’:

I love this colour palette, especially for a children’s book designed to be read just before bed:

Continuous Line Drawings

Continuous line drawings are perfect for drawing without criticism. You draw, keeping the pen on the paper for the whole drawing, meaning you might go over lines multiple times. It is a very inaccurate way of drawing and yet has a beauty all of their own. I popped them into a small booklet and stuck them in my first double page:

In the picture below, you can see the little booklet and also the completed colour palette as described above:

Collage of the Red Car

The last thing I did was make a collage. I painted a sheet of paper with lots of shades of red and pinks and oranges. Along with this sheet, I used the many different marks and collated them together to look (a little) like the red car:

The very very last thing I did was write my design brief for going forward:

And if you’re not totally bored, there’s a video below which has a bit more info. If you’d like to join me, feel free to ping me an email and we can pursue art together!