Every Sunday is Art Day at our house. This week we dove into another wonderful lesson from Carla Sonheim & Lynn Whipple’s Year of Spark. We’re making a simple gesso and watercolour painting on a wood. It didn’t take long before we were totally immersed and having a wonderful time.

Keeping it really simple was a part of the exercise. I might have gone too far with the word love – but hey, what painting isn’t enhanced by a little love?

It was a lot of fun adding and exploring different textures. The next step will be to add some colour and we’ll likely get to that next week.

The wood block exercise has several stages so in between we practiced drawing faces, something I find wildly intimidating to do! I so love people’s faces and would like to find my way of adding people to my creative work and so I’m trying to gently show up and give it a try. I even made a dedicated journal for the practice. I’m gathering faces – photographs, magazine images, masks, illustrations, and then letting my hand follow the lines and shapes.

Very quickly I discovered that I am most interested in simple shapes, illustrations, sculptures and masks. I love the simplicity and elegance. Now I’m imagining what it would be like to create faces with cut-out shapes instead of with drawing and that’s intriguing to me.

You never know where art day may take you! Once you begin the creative journey, if you’re open to the adventure, the wild road will lead you where it will.