About Art Improv 101: How to Create a Personal Art Journal
“This book is a full art course with a little humor. It takes the fear out of starting your first page and gives you that little nudge to take the first step.” – BARA, Jewelry Designer & Sculptor
Art Improv 101: How to Create a Personal Art Journal focusses on creative play. This method is to art what improv is to comedy; You will make it up as you go along.
Based on 30 years in the graphic arts, artist and writer Carolyn V. Hamilton will share with you ways to play with watercolor techniques, shading with pencils, using decorative borders, and tips for drawing faces, trees, and other objects.
Her goal is to inspire you to create your own personal art journal where you can note thoughts, look inward, officially doodle, observe your life, and maybe even realize miracles. This book contains dozens of technique illustrations. No experience required!
PART ONE: Welcome to Art Improv 101
Introduction
Why Art Journal?
What is creativity?
Where do I start?
Kinds of Art Journals
PART TWO: Practical Techniques
Tools of the trade
The Language of Color & Color Mixing
Watercolor Techniques
Shading with Pencils, Lines & Dots
Decorative Borders
How to draw faces
Simple ways to draw buildings, people, trees & other objects
How to see simple images in a panoramic view
Hand-lettering techniques
Contour Drawing
Many experts neither can nor want to teach a novice. However, this is not the case with the author, who delightedly demystifies capturing a panoramic view, drawing a face, putting “the catch” in an eye, creating borders and centered lettering, and the art of white space. She even tells one how to “do” a major museum in under two hours. Hamilton’s fully illustrated inspirational primer on how and why to begin an art journal makes one want to stop reading and start drawing. She summons the muse and transmits it admirably.”
– The US Review of Books
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Author Bio:
Carolyn V. Hamilton lives the U.S. expat life up in southern Ecuador’s Andes mountains in the Spanish colonial town of Cuenca, one of five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Ecuador.
When she’s not struggling with “Spanglish”, she likes to write books, create art journals, cook, and paint photo-realistic watercolors from her personal photo collection. She also likes chocolate, Border Collies, comedy, alpaca shawls, adult coloring, and lunching with girlfriends.
Raised as a nice Lutheran girl from Seattle, in the rainy Pacific NW area of the United States, she has no problem with lockdowns because as a child she learned to play quietly in her room. Gray, rainy days feel normal, and she regards sunshine with suspicion.
In addition to writing memoir, fiction and non-fiction, she loves to lead writing workshops, and coach aspiring memoir writers.
Having published three memoirs–and a fourth “in the drawer”–she’s learned a lot along the way about the process.
Professionally trained as an illustrator and graphic designer, she spent over three decades working as a marketing executive and copywriter in the real world of Mad Men. Her BA, in Liberal Arts, is from Antioch University Seattle–where she discovered she could get legitimate credits for “life experience.”
Carolyn’s other adventures have included two years’ service as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Suriname (chronicled in part in her memoir, HELP! I Married an Alien A Comedian), and a stint—in her “younger days”—as a Playboy Bunny.
And it’s true that she now shares her fifth-floor, penthouse-like condominium with that ex-husband, the stand-up comedian from Las Vegas.