I have thought long and hard about what was my favorite part of this month's challenge. Aside from painting every day, it has to be painting abstracts from beautiful (and sometime not) fashion designs. Painting big, painting with acrylics, following my heart and having fun are the best way for me to describe the last 30 days. Did I mention I binge watched all 14 seasons of the past Project Runway episodes while I was painting this month? Just for the record that means I have probably now seen every episode at least three times!
Technically the thirty day challenge is over. But we all know, of course it's really just the beginning. This is the time for all of us to build upon what we have accomplished this month. Whether you painted five or thirty paintings, it doesn't matter. We have all learned something from painting more often, from blogging everyday and sharing our art on Facebook and Instagram. The results have snowballed and have been amazing. Many of you told me that you have already blogged more times this month than the entire year. Most of you have found a way to leave "the stuff" behind so when you enter your studio it's all about painting. A lot of you are painting faster and having little trouble finding inspiration to paint. Most of you are painting better. It's been a great 30 days and I thank you all for joining and inspiring me to paint every day this month. Tomorrow we will head back in to our studios and paint some more. We will continue to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and take some risks. We don't need to feel rushed and we don't need to ignore our families anymore (haha). Just paint what you want, but take a little more time to build on the momentum you have created these past few weeks. I promise we will do another 30 in 30 Challenge in January of 2017. In the meantime I will be busy painting and teaching as I have workshops in October and November in Ventura, South Pasadena and Waco Texas! Here is my "collage" of the 30 paintings I completed this month. I created my collage with an on-line program called picmonkey. Just go to PicMonkey and select "create a collage". You can use one of their designs or you can design your own. To make a collage with 30 photos you will need to design your own (or you can use one with close to 30 spaces and just add the additional ones). Then you can drag your uploaded photos in to the collage until you are done. (When you drag in a photo, you can see where to place the photos as you move them around. If you move them around carefully a small gray bar will appear and you can create columns and rows by adding more photos.) One suggestion I have for you is to be sure to use lower resolution photos as it won't upload very large file sizes. If you try to upload all 30 and it won't do it just re-size your photos until it works! It's a fun tool to use. You can change the width and color of the grid lines between the photos and then save the completed collage as a jpeg on your computer. Please post your collages here! And it doesn't matter how many paintings you completed. Create a collage to show off the paintings you created this month. Thanks to the 1003 artists who painted with me this month. You rock! Continue to paint. But do it on your schedule and take on some new projects and challenges. You deserve it! I have decided I am going to really step up my blog which is here on my website. I will be hosting a new marketing challenge in which we will all do some really great things to increase our art sales together. And this includes some of my out of the box ideas too. I promise. So make sure you click on to the box at the top right of this blog that says "Subscribe to The Every Day Life of a Working Artist" so you don't miss out. Just add your email so you will get my blog post every time I add a new post.
8 Comments
10/1/2016 12:43:52 am
Thanks so much Leslie for hosting the challenge! Such a gift! I love your abstracts and your theme was so much fun! Best wishes for continued success to you, and all of the participants :)
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10/1/2016 05:47:27 am
Thank you for the incentive Leslie. I loved your abstracts and I learned a lot from my own process. I did finish all 30 paintings! Still can't believe it. As for the collage, I could only find a template with 25 squares. Does anybody know how I can add 5 more squares to fit all the paintings in?
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Leslie Saeta
10/1/2016 06:12:38 am
I explained it in my blog post! Upload the 30 photos and drag them into the squares. With the extra photos drag them over and you can see how you can add more photos to your collage. It's explained a lot better in my post. It's near the end (sorry my post is so lengthily!).
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10/1/2016 07:11:46 am
Thank you so much, Leslie! I really can't tell you how much this has inspired me and fixed/faced so many fears of mine with painting. One of the largest fears was just to get a painting started. It would take days to weeks to get the nerve to start a painting. Now, I can sit down and jump in, using the tools I've learned through the artists on your show and really reading my art books, whether it be to sketch it first, start with an underpainting or sketching it out on canvas with my burnt sienna. And knowing that I am growing with each brush stroke (and knife swipe) :)
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10/2/2016 09:21:57 pm
Hi Leslie, just want to thank you for this amazing project. I have loved it and it has helped me in so many ways to find my path.
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10/3/2016 01:31:19 pm
thanks for hosting again. I have followed this for several years and I genuinely look forward to it. It makes me think of painting every day...and sometimes i don't even feel guilty that I let other things fall by the wayside. I just think...it has to been done in a month...then its over:)
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