This weekend it’s been so good for me to take sometime off. I’ve been out in the garden, I’ve tucked into my sketchbook and Shannon and I managed to make Friday an art day at the studio!

If you watched my $10 Art Supply video , you’ll want to know how my porcelain display plates worked as palettes. This was my first chance to try them out and they worked like a dream! As paint palettes, these long plates had plenty of room for different colours, cleaned up like a dream and were the perfect place to rest our paintbrushes. I’d recommend this new use for familiar dinnerware!

One of the things I’ve learned to do is to take several pictures as I paint. First, if I like a certain stage of the work, it makes me less intimidated to continue with it because, heck, if I wreck it, I always have a picture! Plus, these paintings can make great backgrounds for jpgs for the studio!

On our art day, Shannon and I completed a lesson for Lifebook 2014. This lesson by Marieke Blokland of Bloknote gave us so much! It got us playing with drawing faces, exploring simple visual symbols and creating heads and backgrounds separately – and I’m sure a lot more.

I’ve been really loving how we decided to approach this course. Whether we think we’ll like a lesson or not, we do it. Whether we think we’ll like a technique or not, we try it. More and more we’re discovering how the learning is in doing something other than what we would normally do.

That’s what I made this week. How about you?

I’m sharing this post as a part of I Made This! If you want to share something you made this week, come on by and join in!