It’s somewhere between 97° and 99° degrees here. I’ve lost the will to do anything.

Fortunately, I have art assignments to prompt me along. And air conditioning in the studio.

This week’s journaling prompt (week 3, first time I’ve done the prompt) is “It’s in the Stars.” When I saw the prompt, I figured I wouldn’t do it this week either. But I was sitting out on the patio one evening this week and decided to try. I drew a star. And considered it for a while. Nothing. So, I started to think about the question literally. What would/could I put inside the star. 1. My dog. 2. My art. 3. My love of horses. 4. Birding. 5. Myself. It got me thinking about how I prioritize things and (for not the first time) I realized I put myself last on the list.

And that was enough introspection for me.

As a reminder, last week’s work was:

• Leave out some information
• Change something
• Define what emotion (in the beginning) I am trying paint. What is the personal connection to me?

And the feeling I was trying to obtain was “transition”.

My goal was to do eight versions of my original inspiration drawing.

I decided to try some organic shapes for this weeks’ attempts.

This was inspired by a drip on my gator board.

This was a lightbulb (one of those curvy ones we’re not supposed to use anymore).

For my final attempts, I decided to work from this week’s challenge:

Composition: Find a painting that inspires and study the type of composition that the artist has employed. I’m showing an example below. See if you can apply the same type of composition to your subject matter. No need to replicate color or subject, etc… but just the type of design form.

I did not nail this, because I didn’t read the instructions (focus on composition). But I did some work on it. I decided to work from and Bénédicte Gelé and Lesley Humphrey . I worked mainly on “feeling.”

Part of the brilliance of her work is her ability to leave things out. I put too much in (though I like the way the horse is done).

On this piece, I worked on copying the “bright center” that goes through the painting. I suspect she is working in oils, which is easier to “carve” shapes out of. But gouache will do in a pinch. It’s different.

The final step in this series is to pick one of the 8 ideas and develop it into a larger painting (each of these is 7.5″ x 11″). Anyone else got a favorite?