Art Club

Nature is always such a wonderful study for drawing, the colours and textures around us provide a perfect pallet for our artists.

There's an amazing 100 year old gum tree in our town which gifted its skin to us, the bark that is. A friend suggested it would make a good art club theme, which of course it did. Hints of aboriginal art came to mind.                      

Oamaru stone is the greatest stone as it's soft and yet resistant. The artists learnt a lot about the qualities of this medium exploring with tools like chisels, files and sanding equipment. The best tools we found were files of a coarse grade. The ideas flowed and the sun shone, thank goodness!                    

Using softcut is a great alternative to lino as its soft as the name suggests. We used the dandelion as a reference to begin but the artists launched off from there into various styles. The colour of the ink and paper made a huge difference in the outcome. We used a lot of sugar paper and that has bold colours.           

We were very lucky to be taught by a Chinese Artist how to paint on rice paper with ink and brush.