Playing with abstract painting, and a challenge

Over the Easter weekend, I spent some time in my studio playing with abstracts.

It is just so much fun to not have a plan and to simply glue down some collage bits on a piece of paper and start moving some paint around on the paper. 

Use whatever is lying around and catches your fancy. Why not try and see what you can do with some graphite powder and paints?

And if you work in a series, you can put one piece aside, work on another, and then come back to it later, when it's dry, to put on another layer. I wasn't happy with the one above at first, it just didn't seem to work. Until I got the pink crayons out. Now I love it.

I'm really glad I re-discovered my crayons! They just add so much vibrancy. And I'm glad I've kept so many of my old annual rail cards, they're great for moving paint around (as is of course any other kind of card). Unfortunately, the railway changed their system, so now everything goes onto one permanent card. Apart from the fact that I don't like the new system at all, it's a shame about the regular supply of cards.

I'm not usually very good with challenges. There's only a few I managed to do from beginning to end, such as some years of the Summer of Colour, the 75 Day Sketch Challenge, and the August Break photo challenge.
But I'm thinking about trying and challenge myself to take part in the Soulful Faces - 30 Faces in 30 Days Challenge, hosted by Galia Alena and Annie Hamman, which starts today! I have to say that some of the prompts sound scary! Just drawing a face every day would be a challenge, but having to come up with something suitable for each prompt every day, well, that really is a challenge. I will probably have to do more than one face on certain days to make up for others, such as Wednesdays, when I have an evening class to go to. But even then, doing, finishing something every day seems impossible. But maybe still worth a try. And that's what I intend to do. I'll see how it goes...