You can probably guess; I love online art classes – I have joined lots of them over the years with varying degrees of success. Usually, I underestimate the amount of free time I will have or the amount of practice needed to achieve the skills I was hoping to learn. Occasionally a class steals into my imagination so quietly that I barely notice and the next thing I have completed a whole body of new work based around the class lessons. This happened recently with a class by Jane Davenport & Joanne Sharpe called ‘Miss Quoted’.
Miss Quoted combines Jane’s love of drawing whimsical girls and Joanne’s skills at teaching lettering with their joint fascination with the mercurial properties of watercolours. I was lucky to attend a weekend workshop with Joanne at Jane’s earlier this year and was hooked on her style of teaching – you can’t help but learn and it doesn’t seem like work or dreaded practice to complete the lessons.
Miss Quoted starts with a bunch of lettering exercises, alphabets and such based on our own handwriting. I found it a great way to train my hand back to a bit of cursive style – I’ve been printing my letters for years! Lately I’ve been happily writing quotes in watercolour in the cute Moleskine watercolour journal I am using for class.
It wouldn’t be a Jane Davenport class without lessons on drawing whimsical girls and this class is no exception. Jane teaches us to draw girls in a variety of ways with watercolour and her Epic pen. Check it out here if you have no idea what I’m talking about. I am really enjoying the process of combining pen and watercolour, there is something quite freeing about it as it can be quite uncontrollable.
As the name suggests there are quotes involved – or rather lettering in among the drawings of girls, in their hair, their clothing, across the pages they sit on – wherever they seem to fit best. I created this quartet based on the lessons and love how they turned out.
Purple Salt #2 