In addition to the digital photography class we are taking this summer, my good friend K and I are developing our own summer curriculum to stay creative and continue to challenge ourselves. Don’t want to get lazy and rusty over the summer!

We came up with a pretty ambitious list of activities to work on, new techniques to try, drawing and illustration practice, and design challenges.

These illustrations you see throughout this post are my results for our first assignment – to create an image with pen over paint washes, splatters, or blots spread randomly on a piece of paper.

I am not very good at thinking in the abstract, so I had a hard time “seeing” images in my original paint blots. But I tried to free my mind of pre-conceived notions and just “feel” it. Now that they are finished, I really love them. Giving each piece a title was fun too.

We are also going to work on a personal project over the course of the summer. My personal project will be to develop a collection of surface designs that I could have printed with Spoonflower to make my own products with.