This has been an amazing summer for me. I started the Facebook Face Experiment a few weeks ago and I've gotten a mass amount of faces to paint. Many aren't on facebook as the senders have emailed me the image. I'm working my way through the stack. Next week on my Ustream I'll be doing a face in color, I think anyway.

I also started the Twitter Hand Experiment which you've read about on here a lot. Good stuff too. I feel a lot more comfortable with drawing hands now and I've developed a technique of blending graphite with acrylic to make a wonderful cool gray.

I was featured on DirtyFootPrints-Studio.com 30 Day 30 Journals project by the wonderful Connie. Each day of this month she's featuring a different art journaler, we've all been asked the same questions, so it's really neat to read all the answers. The other great thing is that she's got people like myself who have been art journaling for 10+ years and those who have been art journaling for 3 months. Great perspectives. 

Jonathan Manning bought a building to turn into a gallery, artist's studios, teaching space and all sorts of awesome. I'm looking forward to visiting OK and teaching a class there. He is also doing the Artistic Biker Live a live UStream broadcast of him art journaling, it's not so much a how to show but a romp around people chatting, discussing art materials, and Jonathan working in his art journal. The other great thing is that often his daughter will join him and make art with him. It's pretty amazing. He broadcasts every Thursday night at 8pm EST and the show lasts about 2 hours. It's great stuff.

Following Jonathan's lead and tutorial, I started UStreaming myself. I have to say it's pretty awesome and addicting. I'll be streaming live content every Monday at 6pm EST. Right now i'm chatting with people and painting faces from the Face Experiment. You can check out the recorded stuff here.

I've decided to do another class. I wont' be ready to run it until Sept. but I'm well into writing the lesson plans and outlines. Once I get that done I'll be able to work on the PDFs. The idea behind it is that it's a beginners drawing class. It's old skool style drawing exercises that teach you how to use your tools and train your eyes to see. I'm planning on a ton of downloadable PDFs with step by step photos as well as live streaming broadcasts set up class style. the whole idea is to give people confidence in their use of tools and get them practicing drawing.

underwater
Originally uploaded by koigirl

This is a lovely little image. The swirls in the background are quite nice as is the painterliness of the torso. Love it!

I mentioned the Montserrat College of Art's encaustic workshop on my UStream. It is over, it was in the middle of last month. I thought it was this month, ah well. It's a yearly thing. Anyway the link to the site telling you all about it is here.

Also my friend and classmate Helene Farrar does a lot of encaustics. You can see her blog here and the website of her gallery here.

Summer Is:
Originally uploaded by Ms. Natty

Love how she cut out the letters from magazine pages. A simple page but with lots of oomph.

Pasted Drawings
Originally uploaded by rcannonp

Love this guys stuff, He does his work on stickers or junk and glues it into his moleskine. Great stuff.

This is an interesting tutorial on grungy text based background. Pretty cool.

For this page I wrote out an intensely personal entry in a thick ball point pen, pressing hard into the thick soft stonehenge 140lb paper. After I had done that I use a credit card to scrape a REALLY thin layer of red paint over teh top of the writing.

I then doodled a face in sumi ink on the right page which was painted a pale blue color. I used a waterbrush to blend that into the blue background. I wanted to have an area to write on the right side so I used some white acrylic paint to cover up some of the blue. I sealed the sumi ink with some gloss gel medium. After that had dried I went back into the eye area and added the white of the eye.

I watered down some blue acrylic paint and dripped it from the top of the page. After it had dried I used a white watercolor crayon to outline the drips and pop them out a bit.

After the whole thing dried I wrote on top of it with a gel pen, it didn't write so well so I went over it with an elmer's paint pen. On the right side the gel pen wrote well enough so I sealed it with gloss gel medium and after it had dried added some highlights with watercolor crayon.

I discovered, by accident, on this page, that if you brush gel medium over gel pen it lifts and blends it quite well, it continues to lift the ink as it dries. Which could be a very cool technique to try out.

ACEOs watercolor
Originally uploaded by Graham's Art

Love these little ACEO's (ATC?) Done in watercolor, all of farm scenes. I'm a sucker for farm scenes.

wood stork
Originally uploaded by steev-o

Love these ink imakes of the wood ibis. Great stuff.

Sketch001
Originally uploaded by mike.juxtavision

Holy shit. damn. I love this guy's work. Everytime I look at his flickr stream I'm blown away. His work is slightly creepy, ever so weird and yet it draws me into look more closely.