Art Party 02 — SteemCN

What's an art party you ask? Essentially it's a place to collectively create any form of art with other like minded people, free from pressure or judgement. We had a lot of that creative synergy during design school and even while working for a design startup. Since my journey towards self reliance, I've been craving that creative collaboration as it makes a difference to be bolstered by people around me. My sister is also similar minded and hosted the first ever art party for her birthday where people spent time engaging in colab art like snowball poetry and collective mandala drawing. In early January, sharing this desire for more art in our lives @manouche, @karunya and I invaded a friend's house to have an art party where I worked on a surreal drawing for a contest on steemit. It was a fun night and we decided we had to have more art parties while we were all in town. For the second art party, we roped in an old school friend called Bhavya who is an amazing illustrator. He hosts Tuesday Tutorials on his blog where he shares how he makes his art. We figured we could have a live version of Tuesday Tutorial and learn something new through our art party, so we gathered at our house and learnt how to use art markers to draw a scene.

The scene we all drew.

He turned out to be an excellent teacher, and this is the process I followed to create my art.

I start by drawing in the biggest shapes I can see.

Details are then slowly filled in.

Even more details added.

We then use the markers to colour block the shapes we created earlier. The colours take some time to get used to as several shades are possible depending on the pressure and stroke used. I chose colours that resembled the scene and used the blue as a vivid background that stands out. The colours are then gone over with black pen to highlight objects and provide lighting.

What I ended up with.

The best thing about our parties are that imagination is not limited by the rules of perspective. Everyone interpreted the same scene in a different way, some making their art deliberately quirky. Everyone but Bhavya hadn't used these types of markers before. I'm not too used to colour myself, and it was really cool to see art materialize in front of us just by following Bhavya's simple instructions.

Everyone's work from the art party.

There's a lot of group activities one can do in a big city like going to a movie or out drinking. What I particularly love about art parties is that they're fuelled by imagination and yield tangible results. It was great to spend time with other awesome people to be productive while still having a lot of fun. Our art party was a pretty big success and I'm grateful I have people in my life who attend such events.

Go check out @manouche and @karunya's blogs for their own take on art and the beautiful stuff they create. Bhavya has been convinced to join steemit and will be posting here soon. Meanwhile visit his instagram page here for more amazing art and tutorials.

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I miss you, @soulturtle. Invading your place when I come back for an awesome art party in the hills.

Doodle something for me when you do, I wish I could be there for your next art party!!

Send me your address and I'll send you something.

Cool, I will send you a PM on steemit.chat ☺☺

Haha, loving this art exchange :)

Aww, I miss you too. Looking forward to that hill art party. We've got quite a bit going on here otherwise too.

This reminds me of Painting With A Twist, but more fun! I feel a little jelly, but not in a bad way ☺ One day I'll experience all the joy of an art party too :D

Painting with a Twist seems like a lot of fun too. We just happened to come together spontaneously and organically. I'd love to do a steemit art party too if we can figure out the logistics.

Love the idea of the art party where you are learning something as well. Another idea is to work on the one drawing ~ Perhaps on a round table and keep swapping positions so that in the end you can't tell who drew or painted what. Collage is also great to work with in this way. 🦋

We actually did something similar for our first art party. We sat around a table and filled in different parts on a large canvas. Didn't swap positions though, it'd be interesting to try and follow other people's flow. It'd be nice to try this again with that twist. That's the best thing about art parties, anything goes. There are so many ways to be collectively creative! This is what we came up with in the end.

This looks like so much fun!! The closest I have here is a group that does the Denver march against Monsanto, and we get together to make signs and big puppets, etc... I like this, with so many cool perspectives on one thing... Because in the end, it is all about perception, right??