This week’s challenge for Inspire Me Thursday was to use crayons.

I used a technique I do all the time with the kids at school - draw a picture onto a piece of paper using crayons (I used oil pastels here because it’s the closest thing I have). Then, paint over the top of it - the paint will not stick to the spots with the oil pastels. It’s great for doing seascapes with kids, but I chose to do some trees using my white oil pastel & watercolour paints:

Let me know what you think! (I think the top one is the better of the two)

Once again, I have been challenged by Inspire Me Thursday - had to think for a long time about this one.

I decided I’m not very good at painting actual doors so this is a doorway:

Yes, I am participating in *another* online weekly art prompt - this one is called “Monday Artday“, and is a little different because we post our work to the website itself, rather than just a link to our own blogs. But, I wanted to post the paintings I did up here too, so here they are - the topic for this week was “Sleep”:

“Asleep on His Shoulder”

“Sleeping Together” - The title is meant literally - it’s not a euphemism!

Inspire Me Thursday is taking a break this week, so I’m doing my first work for Illustration Friday (which I’ve been meaning to do for a while).  Their topic for this week is “seed”, which fits in nicely with the “scientific” works I’ve been doing lately.

My entries are both watercolours:

“Seed Patterns”                                “Seeds”

Let me know what you think!

Okay, I must admit - this topic really did make me ponder the little promise I made to myself about participating in *every* topic for Inspire Me Thursday. At first I had NO idea what I was going to do for this topic.

After a bit of thinking, I remembered and idea I had a while ago. Matt and I have a great book with photographs ranging from the microscopic level to pictures of outer space. A while ago I thought some of the pictures in the book would be a really good inspiration for abstract painting - many of the images are quite abstract already.

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