Watercolour painting class benefits....why you should read to the end of this post....

The fundamentals of drawing, color theory and applying water colour painting are offered  to you in a structured and fun environment.

 

                              
 The studio is in a  a garden setting surrounded by native birds, trees and the occasional cat with a professional artist who loves teaching and seeing her students succeed.  

Cows, sheep and horses can be seen across the road and you can sometimes hear the grunt of a pig and the intermittent crow of a rooster. 
   

Adults and children's classes are offered in a warm, creative and happy environmet.

My studio/classroom  has had a brand new make-over and I am celebrating by inviting people to come and view it.

You are welcome friends  and  past and new and   pupils  to come over to make a vision board  for free.

If you would like an invitation please call me.
 I have already invited four people and they are coming,  yay...

My offer  is subject to time and space availabity and is limited for one month

Phone  Janet Keen  on 346 3435 to arrange your visit.


Creative Quotes of the day
You have to give people something to dream on. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Winston Churchill



To all the people overseas and out of Rotorua who read this blog.
I am going to be posting a vision board lesson/prompt on my blog for free.
Vision boards change lives for the better.
 They really work if you view them every day.


I want to hear your stories of success, together we can achieve our creativity dreams.


Check out my website http://www.jkeen.net/

Art and Craft Class Benefits

Did you know that....


1.Going to an arts and craft class can help teach you new techniques and improve skills you are already had.
2. Attending art  and craft classes  can help to improve  your stress levels, and rehabilitation from sicknesses and medical injuries.
 3. Many adults  have used arts and crafts making to reduce stress, it  has worked for people throughout the world.
4. Learning how to draw can reduce stress levels in many ways including distraction, flow, and self care.
5.Art is its own field of therapy.
6. The connecton with other people in the class can be great for making friends and  also for alleviating depression and loneliness.



Why not use art to consider getting in touch with your own feelings?
We all know the happiness of creating something unique by sculpting something with play dough, painting with our hands, or even drawling the different places we have seen.
.Art and craft classes can really help.

Transformation- a taste of Autumn in a Rotorua apple orchard...

 Photographing things (like apples) with imperfections is a favourite pass time of mine.

I like an element of orderliness in life but I also love to allow an element of chaos and mystery  to come through and have its day in the sun.

The interior of an apple that has been mined by blackbirds,  becomes a cave for a fruit fly or a small  place to rest out of the rain for a bee.

                  

Even a full blown rotton apples can be made to look beautiful.

Apple rot art, maybe I  have have invented a new genre.

Bright orange berries of Autumn in the cottage riose garden at the apple orchard.

Turning brown as they decay beside their flaking skeletel leaves.

     Beauty can be seen  in what is customarily cast off as ugly or odious.No-one but me seems to like flies, it seems;  even fruity ones. Adventuring with my lens on macro, one crisp apple morning after the rain,
I spy a fly and a dropplet  of dew on an apple and quite surprisingly,  I discover a rainbow.

It's the season for leaves to fall to the ground making jigsaw puzzles that crunch under your feet like cornflakes, as you walk down the path on a crisp Autumn morning towards apple picking time.

But what about the texture  of a hanging grape vine leaf with all its back lit veins and blemishes? 

The Persimmon tree, such an Autumn shock.

The juxtaposition of the burnt orange  against  flaming  scarlet.

Forms a clash

It's balanced against the cool green of the rhododendron

tree.  

But what about the beauty of the fungus that grows on the persimmon?

Focus up close and you'll see a miniature landscape or even city or moon scape. .

Even a run down old rusty corrugated iron garden shed in an apple orchard can be a focus of beauty, a patina of character is imprinted through the process of decay. 

Have you ever noticed the feeling  of the items inside an antique shop as opposed to the feeling of the items for sale inside a brand new department store?

The process of time and handling etches each vintage item with a personality.   

Memories and mysteries are discovered through references to times long passed.

 The apple orchard is a place on the edge of change. 

Who will carry on the  legacy of the apple orchard business when the owners become to old to carry on? 

Will the whole place be sold and cut up for sterile subdivisions?

Made  smooth, shiny and souless by large  glossy houses that refuse to blend into the landscape.

Decay, rust, cracks and flaking paint....all the ingredients of imperfection mixed up in a confection of

chaos.

There are plenty of Autumn leaves still left to fall.

                                                                               But

There is only probably two or three weeks more apple picking time left so it would be great

 if any Rotorua people reading this blog could go and pick some.

They only cost $1.00 a kilo and they are the most delicious things in the whole wide world especially when you make them into a delicious apple (and Fejoia) crumble.

 I have made  up an amazing recipe, it anyone wants it, let me know.

Next time I make it I will even try to take a photo of it.

A wasp eating an apple morsel on the edge of the last of the summer roses.

Creativity Quotes of the day

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful an expression of life as growth.
-Miller, Henry Valentine

There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.
Sarah Josepha Hale

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning

Practising with a friends wide angle lens, can you tell the difference?

Black and white photography

What makes a good black and white photo?
This is an experiment to see what does and doesn't work.
I'll take ten random photographs from my collection and turn them into black and white in photoshop and see what happens...
How about voting for your favourite?

 

 

 

 

Creative quotes of the day

In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything.

Cat Stevens


There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.


Van Morrison

Impressionst photos of Rotorua Lakefront after studying talented Eva Polak's beautiful website.

                                                                     Let there be light

People from all over the world come to Rotorua to photograph its beauty, what better place to practise on than the Rotorua lakefront with the suset, autumn leaves and city lights.

We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light. ~Earl Nightingale

They may as well have called the sun a ball of flaming joy. ~Terri Guillemets

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. ~Edith Wharton

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. ~Kahlil Gibran

An age is called "dark," not because the light fails to shine but because people refuse to see it. ~James Michener

We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light. ~Mary Dunbar

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary. ~Aaron Rose

A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you're at home. ~Author Unknown

               We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own. ~Ben Sweetland

Illustration using water soluable oil pastels.

                                

This illustration came from a dream.

Often I will sit down and just start drawing and see what comes out.

In this case it was a wierd looking cat/angel woman balancing  on a clothes line with her outstretched hands to a bird who is feeding her young with a worm.  

She has been harvesting carrots from an organic garden in front of a church.

Maybe  it's alluding to the fact that some people  may seem like angels but really they are quite the opposite.

You need to be wise about whose hand you hold because you might end up in an early grave by being made into sparrow soup with carrots.

You could literally be the last supper.

Trust your inner guidance and eat more organic carrots if you are a catwoman and more organic worms if you are a bird, coz every day above ground is a good day and don't forget to wash your underwear regularly.

Find  some time to smell the roses.

Are you confused yet? 

You should be because dreams are often hallucinogenic aren't they?.

Method:

Draw something in  HB pencil first thing in the morning in a visual diary or on water colour paper.

 Outine the drawing in black waterproof pen.

Lay water soluable oil pastels over the surface.

 Add water to the colour with a brush.

Dry

Lay some while acrylc or watercolour paint  paint over the pastel to knock the colour back so it's not so garish, especially the background.

Go over the foreground with water soluable oil pastels and add water to them with a brush.  

Creative Quotes of the day

Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.

Robinson Jeffers


Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie.
Jim Davis

If you live in New Zealand and you don't know how or where to find  reasobaly priced water soluable oil pastels, join the club.
I had beeen searching for six months but finally I have found them, so if you want to know you'll have to ask me.

At the moment I'm experimenting with water soluable oil pastels. Half way through I decided to visit the Be funky site and transform these dogs.

You too could do this to your dog...might  track down my cat and transform him as well.
Think I 'll be taking a trip down to dog obedience club pretty soon.
I need more victims...oops I mean subjects for dog and people portraits.

Here's another dog poem from

 Our own Kind By Siobhan Harvey.

Dog's Body

Chris Price

If this were childs play

and I could choose

I'd be the dog-

body a soft black curve

on the stone flags

of the square outside the gallery-

patient in my red collar

and tongue

all my love

in waiting

Creativity Quote of the Day

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost