The Challenge for June is Be Creative with crayons!
 Photograph, paint or use them!
Melt them, crush them, make a scratch drawing like you did in primary school!
Have fun!

If you want a jump on July, the Challenge is Vanishing Point. As always with the challenges, the interpretation is entirely up to you.

The topic jar is getting a little low. Help out by sending topic suggestions to cagac.ca@gmail.com

by Lynne Ayers In the spirit that the challenge was presented (springing forward into something new)   I took on something I haven’t done before — still life.  This wasn’t as much about painting flowers as it was about playing with colour. 

by Bobi Leutschaft Poitras After missing the last few challenges out of simple laziness and forgetfulness, I was determined to enter the Spring challenge.  I was supposed to use something other than my usual medium, so, as the post predicted, I had a couple boxes of pastels tucked away at the back of a messy drawer in my art dresser. I am terrible at drawing on paper, so decided to use a canvas I had kicking around.  I applied pastel and smudged it in with paper towel.  I drew a daffodil and coloured it in, smudging each section as I went.  I was thrilled with the result.  

I needed to apply a fixative, so I procured an old can and shook it well for the required 2 to 3 minutes.  Then I put my precious daffodil flat on the driveway, pried the lid off the can with the suggested screwdriver, and positioned myself over the artwork.  I pressed the nozzle and OH NO – it just started dripping all over my work!  I stopped, shook it again, and tried to get a nice even spray, but all it would do was drip.  Had I put my work on an easel to spray it, it probably would have been okay.  However, there were now many big drop marks all around the bloom.  Hmmm.  I got some hairspray and applied that to keep it from smearing, but the work was ruined. 

Or was it?

I heard myself telling my students at Community Living over and over that no mistake couldn’t be fixed.  I took my own advice and propped that ruined daffodil back on my easel.  I painted over it and to my surprise, the end result – below – pleases me far more than the original.  Never give up!  (unless you accidentally put your work through a shredder… then give up.)

Never give up!  (Unless you accidentally put your work through a shredder… then give up.)

[Ed.’s note: British artist, Banksy, arranged for a work of his to be shredded just as the gavel came down at auction. It sold for 1.3 million pounds. Some predict the publicity makes the work worth three times as much.]

By Milo Smith Spring means new life.  So, I present a montage of four from this year. 

First a close-up of some Marsh Marigolds (a kind of buttercup in truth); then a pair of geese with two goslings standing by Mill Pond; followed by a female Northern Bluet Damselfly; and finally some buds on a Manitoba Maple (not my favourite tree) as the sap started to flow.

By Susan Latreille I wasn’t sure what to enter for the May challenge.Spring makes me think of tulips and daffodils, but then I figured they might possibly be the most obvious choices for entries.Then I realized that the trees were vying very strongly for this year’s ‘best of spring’ so I decided to showcase some of the younger trees in my front yard with this photomontage.

By Kerry Herwynen McIntosh This month’s challenge has been, well, a challenge. My initial goal was to use the oil paints that had been gifted to me.  I had been anxious to paint the spring blooms sprouting in my (untended) garden. 

I was looking forward to the smells I remembered from my youth, when my mother would paint.  I recall loving the aroma of linseed oil and turpentine. Goes to show you how distorted our recollections can be.  Just putting the paints down on the pallette gave me an horrendous headache. After two attempts I gave up.  I turned instead to a project I had begun three years earlier: a dandelion gone to seed. 

I’ve been saving plastic 6-pack soft-drink rings for this idea.  It took a while to string them together in a way that they would fan out nicely.  Then, I attached a broken lucite tube from my husband’s office for the stem. (I hope he doesn’t want it back because that sucker is glued permanently!) 

Now, I’ll figure out how to use it as a garden ornament. Er, exterior art.

By Tina Whitman Well this month the challenge wasn’t what to paint but what I was painting with.

I too had been given a starter pack of oil paints and thought how much easier it could be not having paints drying up on the palette.  Or dealing with a Sta-wette palette and have paint lose its creaminess.

Oils,  I’ve found out, are are whole new “challenge”.  But I think it will be worth trying again and again, until I get the hang of it.

As for the subject of the spring challenge, there was no question about how wonderful my neighbours’ tulips are. What a showing of beautiful colour, I just wish they could last even longer into the season.