Wheat Art

If you've been around this blog for a while you've probably noticed I haven't been drawing lately. One of the reasons is because I've been busy this month taking an art history class at the local community college in order to get the credits I need to renew my teaching license in the state of Kansas. I've been reading and writing like crazy because this class is basically a semester long class crammed into four weeks. Even though I'm doing a lot of reading and writing I have been able to do a little artwork in this class.

This is a monoprint. Basically I painted this composition onto a piece of plexiglass with water soluble paint, in this case high quality watercolors. The paint is allowed to dry and then placed on top of a very wet piece of heavy water color paper. Then a rolling pin is rolled back and forth on top of the plexiglass to transfer the design to the paper. After this one was dry I went into it with some colored pencils to add more lines around the sun and most of the black at the bottom.

The wheat crop has been on everyone's minds here this summer, mine too, and artists are often influenced by their environment and community. I've just had a lot of different wheat designs on my mind lately and have somehow wanted to express some of the anxiety over a drought and poor wheat harvest.

This is a canvas I've just started. I painted the entire canvas red using acrylic spray paint and tonight I just finished drawing on the design with a white pencil. I'm hoping to get into this painting this week. It's been a while since I've painted and I'm probably kind of rusty. I'm thinking of painting with only white and having a very stark painting. We'll see how it works out.