Solve it Sunday

My student, Emma has been painting with me since she was about 4 years old (she's 8 now) and is enthusiastic about art each and every time I see her. We recently looked through her gigantic portfolio of art and boy, is it impressive! She has a body of work to rival any professional artist of 30 years. I hear she is working on a new piece and I can't wait to see it!

Today's puzzle is an impressionist style painting created by Emma when she just under 7 years old and it's one of my favorites. The view is of Belfast Lough, sketched, then painted while looking out of the window from her mum's 2nd floor office window. I always encourage Emma to take liberties while painting...after all, it is her painting and her imagination, so it can be anything she wants it to be, right? In this painting, I particularly love how she chose to include the train, but made it a shade of blue, so that it didn't detract from the sea she had so carefully painted. It was just such a well-thought out, mature creative decision and I think a very good one too! I wish I had taken a reference photo, so you could see her subject matter in real life. You can see more of Emma's work on my flickr.


Enjoy!

Emma's Completed Painting

Emma is nearly done with her painting after many, many hours of hard work! Just a few finishing touches left to go.

What a lovely painting of a brown haired girl with pig tails, blue eyes and a great smile. Hmm...I wonder who she reminds me of? ;)


Recently, I posted about my student, Emma, who has been working on her own mixed media girl. She finished it yesterday after several sessions of painting...about 7 or 8 hours worth of work in total. Looking at her wonderful results, I'd say her time and efforts have certainly been worth it. My photograph doesn't do her beautiful painting justice, but I'm sure you can still tell what a brilliant job she did. I think her passion for art really shows in her work and I'm very proud of her.

Emma...I am an Artist Too

Emma working on adding some colour. At this stage she has added collage and gesso for texture, some Stewart Gill Byzantia paints for some shimmer to peek through and is now adding glazes to build up some rich colour.

Emma's painting in the early stages, just before she moved on to painting the background.


This is Emma...artist extraordinaire! She took classes in my studio for 3 years and has continued on with me as a private student since I decided to close. For as long as I've known Emma, she has had an artist's heart. She has always approached every lesson with excitement, enthusiam and creativity. I needed a creative kick in the pants, so I recently took some online workshops, including one with the fabulous Suzi Blu. I learned some new techniques, was reminded of old favourites, and most importantly feel creatively rejuvinated. I started approaching my art as Emma does again...as if every painting is an adventure...because of course, it is.

I always show whatever I have been working on to Emma, so when she saw my mixed media girls, she wanted to try her hand at this type of painting too. She's been working on her own mixed media girl for the last several weeks, probably around 5 hours worth of work so far. We have reviewed the concepts of drawing a face in quadrants, layering, creating texture, applying collage, colour theory and more. This was Emma's first attempt at shading a face and I have to admit to butterflies in my stomach when I saw her wonderful results! Can you believe she is only 7!? Emma still has a fair bit of work to do on this painting, but wow...what a journey so far.