Sketchbook Project - The Conversation

I am working together with an art friend of mine, Jill Polsby, on a really unique art piece. We are doing the Sketchbook Project this year together as a team! Our Sketchbook theme this year is "Time Travel" - and since we live on opposite coasts in the US, we thought traveling through time was rather fitting for our endeavor.

Jill contacted me about possibly working together and she had a wonderful idea. Her blog has previously described how "The Conversation" works -- for the life of me, I can't find her blog entry that describes this so I'll do my best to explain.

We are using basically a combination of watercolors, watered down acrylics & ink pens on 140 lb Cold Press Watercolor stock which is precut to the 5x7 size. To start, we both painted a couple of paintings (Jill actually did 4 of them) which I'll post her items here.

Aren't they wonderful? I did a couple of paintings which can be seen on Jills Blog - click over to take a look. 

We each now have to paint 1 or 2 paintings that "hook up" with one of the paintings we received. In other words, I take 1 of Jills works above and create a "mate" for it - making sure my colors & lines follow her design. She will then build off one of the sides of that pair.

We'll continue to go back & forth with our art - each one building off one of the sides. Hence, the conversation - as each frame will blend in with the frames on it's sides. When all are attached & folded out - you will see one long image that flows from one end to the other.  My description isn't the most clear to understand - drat, wish I could locate her older blog entry that described & showed how the "conversation" works - she had done this in the past.

At any rate, I did do a painting that is a "mate" for one of hers. Here are the 2 side-by-side:

Jill's is on the right, my addition is on the left. (Note: photo was taken before the thin black ink lines were all added.) See how the colors & lines need to follow through from one to the other? Now the 2 pieces do not have to resemble each other all that much (not necessarily like I did here). But the edges that "kiss" have to match - you can take part of an image, continue it onto the new frame & then have it morph out to something alltogether different. (I may try that!)

This was so much fun & quite a challenge. To design, to balance the design, to match color & to make the flow happen from one frame to the next. Jill - if you're reading this, you now know what I've done (so far). All 4 of Jill's works called out to me, so no doubt, I will get another done before I pop them all in the mail & send them back to Jill. Can't wait to see what she came up with from one of mine!