The in and out of it...

So, guess what we did in art this week. We colored. Yep, just like the old days with coloring books and crayons, except these were our own line drawings, and we only colored them with just one color, one inside the lines and one outside the lines. This is otherwise known as positive and negative space. And it was challenging. First I made this huge sketch of a vaseful of liles, big luscious stargazers, on a great big piece of newsprint. Then I selected parts of the sketch with my 8 inch window, made with Bristol paper and my handy-dandy Xacto knife, outlined them and whipped out the oil sticks, which behaved just like Crayolas. Challenge was to stay inside or outside the lines, proving that college coloring is not very different from kindergarten coloring. Whatever, when I was done, I had some nifty designs. I was surprised to see that I liked the finished product. Whatever, I am having a lot of fun playing with all these neat little artsy tools. I am headed to the art supply store later for a compass and the rest of the stuff, like some acrylics. And I have homework, to fill little boxes with 4 kinds of lines: straight, angled, curved and bent, one each in every little box, 20 to a page, 5 pages in 4 mediums (the fifth page is mixed media). Cannot tell you how much fun this is. Doesn't take a lot of talent, either, which is definitely a good thing. Still, I didn't feel like mine were any worse than anyone else's, and am actually kind of proud of them. There was a time when I wouldn't even try this. This is progress. I think.