Each month of my Life Book class has its own theme and Febuary’s theme was Celebration & Courage.  All four weeks’ lessons fell under this overarching theme.  I am enjoying this course so very much!  It’s fun to know that a new lesson will be in my inbox every Sunday evening for the entire year and that I’ll be learning new drawing or doodling techniques each week.

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Week 6, being the first lesson of the month, was taught by Tamara Laporte.  She led us through the steps of drawing a full body that embodies courage.  I was pretty proud of my sketch.

Tamera taught us how to use a shape (here a lion as a symbol for bravery) to stain the background a different color than our main image.  Since mine didn’t really look like a lion, I drew in some of it’s features.

Here’s the finished girl after finishing all the stain techniques and coloring her in.

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Later in the month, Jane Davenport guided us on what she calls an “unstumpification” technique, taking a figure from a magazine and elongating it by tracing various parts of it and moving the paper around.  I had trouble getting my traced figure onto the watercolor paper, but it’s an attempt.

The final image is meant to highlight all the things I’ve been brave about in the past years and things that give me courage, as well as the things I have done that have taken courage and things I’ll be doing in the future that will need courage.  I can’t say I love it but I did it.

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The last lesson of February was led by Danita, who taught us how to take a printed image and paint over it to become something entirely new.  I am not so good at this one either, but here it is.  🙂 Maybe I would like it if I didn’t know what the original pictures looked like.

So that’s our February Life Book update! March is all about Connection… should be fun!

You can see more “Behind the Art” posts here and more Life Book posts here.