Artist Study: Lifting Color Stories

Ahhhh habits! Just like I talked about earlier this week on the blog, I treated myself to a little pool time + artist study. Which therefore produced an amazing amount of work, inspiration and influence for me! See, treats totally work! So do making time for the important things. Anyway, I spent some time at the pool with friends (win-win) this week and took along one of the art books I checked out from the library. Here And There about Dieter Roth's trip to Germany to work on screen printing was this weeks artist study book. The book only had about 6 pages of text that was a beautiful illustration of life in a frozen German art studio 30 years ago. The rest were photos from the studio and, most inspiring, a series of Dieter's screen prints. He created 100 prints from 1 drawing and did them in all different color ways.I can clearly see a rabbit here, you do too right?!What I did to Steal Like An Artist, was went through the prints and chose color stories that interested me. I've felt really stuck lately in my color pallets and have been really overly focused on a handful of colors (that I love) but I needed to branch out. So I went color hunting. I didn't use ALL of the colors from each print, but instead I picked out a handful that grabbed my attention, that I felt paired well and some that were SO out of my normal palette. As you can see, some are really far out for me and some are closer to home, but add in some new tones and shades that were really fun to mix. Even if all this was, a mixing exercise, it was a fantastic one. It really got my brain working and pushed me to experiment and learn more about how my paints work and react to one another. But, of course I didn't let it stop there. I immediately started dreaming up new ways to use these colors and started translating them right away. I really loved that the book included Dieter's original print sketch, which looked like a paint by number, and that sparked an idea for my next art journal page. I hand drew, more organically than bunny-ly, my own paint by number inspired by Dieter, picked my favorite paint palette and started painting. It's not done yet, these take so long! But I'm really excited to work it into my Season of Connections art journal for Get Messy this season as a way to express connection to another artist I admire.I love the process of mining the world for inspiration. If you want to learn more about how to do this on your own in other art, in your travels and in your life, then you will love my Travel Like An Artist course. In the course I will teach you how to create and keep an inspiration journal, where to look for color stories, patterns, inspiration, how to collect it and how to turn it into unique, new art. Enroll in the course today here. Have a messy and inspiration filled weekend!