Eveline Says Daily Don't Work
Originally uploaded by Blade21292

Jonathan, better known as the artistic biker is doing a daily drawing challenge, he's loading up the pictures daily. You can sign up to get them emailed to you. Read what he has to say here:

My friend Eveline (http://eveline-timeless.blogspot.com/) recently posted the "Daily don't work" for her. Meaning that she does better when she can commit to something at her own pace. I can respect that. However, I'm still going to challenge her, and everyone else to commit to 10 minutes a day doing something creative. For me, I want to improve my drawing skills. I've already started doing 10 Minute Daily Nude Figure Drawings. I won't kick myself if I miss a day, but of course the intent is to do it EVERY DAY.
A daily drawing habit was the very best thing I ever did for myself artwise. It helped me see shapes rather than objects. It help me train my hand to work with my eyes. It challenged me to get creative with the composition to keep it interesting. But, most importantly, it forced me to do something creative EVERY DAY!

So. That's something I would like to give back to you folks. I will be taking pictures of simple objects that you might find anywhere. I will post them here in color and grey-scale for you to use as a reference. They are Creative Commons license, or at least they will be, so use 'em for anything that you aren't selling. If you want to use them in something you're going to sell, please e-mail me to discuss it.
If you would like to share your daily practice, I've created an "invitation only" group over on The Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/groups/artisticbikerchallenge/). If you would like to join the group, all you need do is ask. I just didn't want the ENTIRE flickr community commenting on our posts.

If you would like to have the challenge photos and their responses e-mailed to you, sign up for The Newsletter.

I like what SamanthaKira has to say in her videos and her techniques are great, her journals aren’t overly cutesy but not overly dark either. She talked for the first half of the video and the music in teh second half needs to be shut off, but I think that’s because i’m old. I like her idea of filling pages with collage and paint then going into to  work on them later… Oh wait that’s very similar to my technique.

I’m glad to say that Traci BUnkers has stuff up on youtube now. (I’m sure she’s had it for awhile but I just found it.) Everyone should check out her videos and her website and check out her very cool stuff for sale. Her rubber stamps are too cool and really something I lust after and I’m not that into rubber stamps for the most part, I carve my own but own very few commercially available stamps.

RobenMArie on youtube creates a journal page that is super cool, lots of layers, colors an djournaling and uses my most hated image:the butterfly without being hooky or cheesy. And she’s using a cool spray on ink that I need to find out more about… Anyway watch this great video.

I’m into a big fan of using mass media images in my art BUT I see some possibility in this particular technique. In this video she takes an image from what looks like a fashion mag, glues it into her journal, gessos over the top of it and then colors it by hand. Because the features are muted and dulled it would be very easy to turn that image into a zombie or dirty it up pretty fast. I’ll try it out and see what I get. Zombies. Yeah. I love zombies. Killer fashion zombies. So cool!

Oh wait where am I’m going to find fashion magazines? We don’t have any in the house.

MIllande does some very very good texture and printmaking stuff in her art journal series on youtube, her stuff is very informative, not cutesy nor pandering. I love it.

business cards
Originally uploaded by Sketchbuch

Sketchbuch hits it out of the park again, with these little business card drawings, they are very cool, esp when you consider the size!

Make food not war
Originally uploaded by Mattias Adolfsson

I love everything Mattias Adolfsson does on flickr. Everything is just slightly outlandish and yet ever so believable. I'd love to spend 20 minutes rooting around in his brain just to see whats really going on in there.

Probably my favorite technique is to write on a page with sharpie, it can either be previously gesso coated, acrylic painted or raw paper. It doesn't matter.  After that you go over the sharpie wriitng with gesso. As the gesso dries part of the sharpie writen text is visible through the gesso. It lifts into teh gesso and is slightly purple. It works with red sharpie as well, and several other colors that I've tried. It works with the liquitex gesso I use as well as the clear. Sharpie will also lift into heavy body acrylic paint. You can then write over the gesso or treat just link a gesso coated page. I like to then add more layers over the top of the writing.

Here I used a page I had coated in liquid acrylic and gesso and stamped some random round shaped onto. I wrote ontop of that with a standard fine tip sharpie.

This is still partially wet, as the gesso dries more the purple will lift into it more. I was too impatient to take a pic of it fully dry. I ended up adding more to the image before I could ge another pic.