The 1st - Tuesday Teaser

I've been giving some thought to trying to put together an on-line design group. So many of you have mentioned that you long to be part of just such a gathering, but time, location and maybe the distance between you and any other willing participants have kept you away.

Well, as I work through this process I thought it might be fun to share some of my own DG's fun and open the things we do to any of you who'd like to join along.

We decided to become a bit organized in our efforts this year, so each of us has purchased a sketchbook 9X12, that has a heavier weight paper (so we could use a variety of mediums as may suit)... and we were off.

The Tuesday Teaser will be the same opening exercises we do. We all have put a word or series of words onto slips of paper & thrown them all into a basket. Then when we arrive we pull a slip out - announce the word - set the timer (1) 5 minutes for pencil drawing & (2) 15 minutes for collage - and we're off.

This morning, (just to let you know we are not stuck on too many rules) the slip came out and everyone groaned --- too many words... pick another --- again too many words... well, the third time we just decided to throw a bunch of them together and you could pick & choose what you wanted. So please, take what you like and enjoy the process.

Out long winded words ended up being -
A long time ago, a secret is revealed at Jr.High in the morning....

Below is a photo of our sketchbooks all showing the collages we came up with.

More In Black & White

I hope you all enjoyed visiting the blogs on the Bloggers Quilt Festival and seeing all the quilts... it really is a always a lot of fun, and especially nice for you can keep traveling the blogs long after all the quilts have been taken down in Houston.

Today though, I wanted to continue sharing the current happenings in my design group.
Meeting once a week we use this time together to work on general design work, topics and/or materials of interest and things very much removed from what may be going on in our own studios. We usually have a plan... a big picture for the day/week or month and for the next several weeks we planned to use art works found in old Christies Catalogs as jumping off places for our design exercises. Then using the criteria for the day we each create 3 spin-offs from the original - and for each we have 20 minutes. This week, we could use only black & white for our creations.

I've included here pictures of my own three pieces....

A long view of our table in action ---

And, some of the works from the rest of the design group....

I hope that by sharing these little adventures that you may find one or two that you might like to try yourself.

Want to join us regularly?!?
You need only pick yourself up a sketchbook
and check in here for details.

or, leave a comment-

if there's  interest we could kick off
an on-line design group!

This coming week we'll be working in the same way, only using color.