Working on a course by Juna Biagioni - The Many Faces of Charcoal

I love all of Juna's courses, they are wonderful. Her art is so so beautiful and it is just amazing to get the chance to work on her courses. Here are some I am doing at the moment except for the third one down which I did on another course "Drawing Frieda"...the rest are from my current course.

A bit of fun!

I painted this after my choir went to London to sing. It's just a photocopy as it was a gift for our lovely teacher, Julie Nye, who runs The Dawn Chorus...our choir. It was a lot of fun to do, l do enjoy this sort of thing, really takes away a lot of worry about getting it just right. Haven't done much since, just lots of practice drawing in a sketching diary. I want to work on quick sketches of whole figures at the moment.

Just working by myself again ...

I like her rather wistful face and I enjoyed working on cardboard. I like the faded and rather unfinished feeling it gives.

Working on "Charcoal Like Mad" course by Kara Bullock

Updated versions of Our Lady

I don't think I have even got the very final composition on camera...thought I had ...but this is close.

Our Lady

I have just painted this picture of Our Lady for a friend. It is a mix of acrylics, oil pastels and oils.

"Drawing in the soul" - an online course with Juna Biagioni

I completed a 12 week online art portrait course recently. I loved this course so much and learnt a huge amount. Juna Biagion, who runs the course, is both a wonderful artist and a fabulous teacher. Here are some of my portraits from the course.

Abstract play with my feelings....

A little bit of help along the way....

There was a lovely and helpful exercise done last week on Life Book. It involved using simple stick people diagrams on 3 square story boards to help solve problems in our lives .... both big and small. I love drawing little cartoon people anyway and enjoyed doing these two. This first one is very simple....for those days when I am simply feeling a bit low, the second much more serious and dealing with a personal great worry in my life. That one was hard but also healing.

A birthday card for our music teacher!

We are standing in a row like a scale practising our solfa! Pete is playing with the ball we use for learning to identify the notes on the beat...... Just for fun. I did add musical notes but haven't got a picture of the completed card. I love drawing these little cartoon characters, it is a lot of fun without any real @artistic@ pressure!

Paintings from Life Book 2017 with Tamara Laporte

Working through a painting in stages

A very personal painting

This is very definitely a painting for my children. It is very personal and actually makes me cry a bit when I look at it but I love it. It is mixed media with several layers so there is also an awful lot more tucked away under those layers.

Image Transfer

I have done a bit of image transfer in the past as part of a mixed media page but recently had a go at transferring images and photos to small canvases. The level of success varies as you can see below, it seems slightly harder to transfer to canvas than just to heavy duty watercolour paper but I am getting there and learning with each one. Still working on getting a better image of the first one....every time I do it I seem to lose just a bit too much of the image when I rub off, or rather a bit of the image in a place where I really need it to stay. They are meant to look old and vintage-ey and I like that effect. I read somewhere that a bit of oily household polish on the final image can help remove the final bits of cloudiness which I am going to try. I haven't done it on these and I haven't got pictures of all the ones I have tried but I think I will try and keep a record of how they develop from now on.

Art fills my soul

Some recent paintings

I am really critical of my work as I guess most of us are but I quite like these three paintings, well at least the first two, not very happy with the third. At least I got a little bit of pleasure from something I had done in the first two and I enjoyed experimenting with multi coloured and layered backgrounds in pictures 1 and 3. It was interesting to see how it affected what I could actually achieve on the faces themselves.

My new start didn't happen....but trying again.....

I don't know what suddenly urges me to come back to my blogspot but here I am again and I see it is almost a year since I decided to "start again". What happened? I am not sure....I think I just sort of completely withdrew into myself, I can't say more. Anyway I am back to try again, we will see. I hardly drew or painted at all last year but have started again now, thanks to Tamara Laporte's wonderful Lifebook which I decided to enrol into again this year in order to make myself make time to paint again. Art is such a solace and I am wrapped up in it once more. I have a few pictures to post but will start with this journal page. It is the result of a melancholy day thinking of when my children were very small, all the wonderful moments which were fated to become shattered for us all when their father left and we lost our home. Things were hard but eventually sort of worked out. Nothing is perfect and I am still consumed with worry about them but they are all beautiful, kind, honest people who try hard and work hard. I am so proud of them for they had such a difficult upbringing. Now I have three beautiful grandchildren....in the same order as my children as it happens ... boy - girl - boy. I have a lovely husband too who is a wonderful stepdad and a beautiful grandad. I will try and keep my blog us this time......

Coming back to life......

Several months have passed now since I decided to close down Dancing Daisies. At that time I had been hacked and subjected to some hurtful abuse and it just about finished me off last year. I had been very low with depression at the time and an anxiety problem hurtling out of control but during the past few months I have been healing and found my way again. I never thought I would feel up to re-opening Dancing Daisies but today on my 67th birthday, I suddenly felt I wanted to. As this thought came to me out of the blue, I felt perhaps it was important to follow that "gut" feeling.

The content of my blog is likely to change a bit, due a lot to what has been going on in my heart and my head since last year....but I will just let it be ....and see what happens. If you do pick me up again by any chance, thank you for reading.

A new dawn.....

Closing "Daisies"

I am really sad to have to do this but I am going to close down my blog as I have been the target of a very vicious email linked to my social network site Freeing Your Wings. I have been struggling with very bad depression this year and I cannot cope with the feeling of being open to attack in this way. I am in the process of withdrawing myself as much as I can from the internet and to finish posting on my Dancing Daisies blog is very sad for me. I don't think many people follow me but I have loved doing it. If you did ever follow me thank you so much. I hope all goes well for you but this will be my last post.

Love Lynda x

Joseph and another of Stanley

My little grandson, Joseph, has been by far the hardest to capture and I do not feel as if I have managed it. This second one of Stanley I prefer, as it is softer.