Just Enjoying Art – Marjasall Productions – The Artworks of Mark Jason Allen

Intuitive Painting is a Joy

marjasall — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:34:52 +0000

While trying out a handful of various watercolor brushes, I found myself creating an intuitive watercolor painting. It’s quite fun and relaxing, intuitive painting.

If you aren’t familiar, intuitive painting is having no preconceived idea of what you are even going to paint. There’s no plan. No subject matter. Each line, wash, layer of paint that I lay down hopefully propels the painting forward, and the image takes on a life of its own as it grows. I have no idea what the painting is going to become — it happens as we go and it may change direction several times. In simplest terms, it’s doodling.

As you paint intuitively, you may start to notice details in random washes of color and in line work. For example, a squiggle line looks like a branch of a tree, or an odd shape might look like a cat. Why would there be a cat in the painting, you might ask? It doesn’t matter why. If a puddle of paint wants to be a cat, let it be a cat. It’s similar to finding shapes in the clouds. Let the painting take shape and then morph.

The process is freeing because the painting doesn’t have to look good or even look like anything specific. It can be abstract. You can explore your imagination and perhaps your mood might even reveal itself in the randomness. It’s a great way to find your artistic style, and a great way to experiment and express yourself. It’s an escape, even – I tune out the world and anxiety, and I paint. Intuitive painting promotes creativity, it frees us from rules, and its great practice to becoming a better artist.

I have no name for the piece I created, as it had no subject. Labeling it could identify it, yes, but I also think it could rob the piece of its free nature. I think it’s a stream of consciousness collage of visions and messages. I think it’s whatever you see in it or however it speaks to you. It’s interaction with you is to make you think and wonder.

The Mini Travel Palette

marjasall — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:21:04 +0000

As Summer approaches the days have been getting very warm. We’ve had many sunny days in the 70s and 80s (F). Flowers are blooming, our vegetable garden is coming up, and everything is green. I love Summer. It’s my favorite season. It’s the time that I do most of my living. I feel healthier in the Summertime, I suppose because I am outside more, soaking in sunlight and fresh air, being more active, mentally and physically. Life seems more colorful, because it is. The Summer is very stimulating for me. Sunshine, flowers, tending to our vegetable gardens, walking my dogs on the wooded trails around the river below us, bird watching. The sunshine and the greenery put me in a better mood, for certain. It inspires me and calms me. It’s healing. Winters here are long, cold, and brutal, and by the end of winter, my health is usually suffering, so in the warmer months I try to spend as much time as I can outside, in nature, when it’s most alive, and there are so many colorful things around me to translate through paint and pencil.

I’ve been painting outside often over the past couple of weeks, out on our deck under the open gazebo. I’ve been painting tiny pictures of birds, using the small travel watercolor palette set that my wife gifted to me last Christmas. I first mentioned that gift in my January 2026 blog post. Since the weather has become nicer, I’ve finally been using it and I love it. It’s been fun because it is so unobtrusive. It’s lightweight and fits in my pocket. As I started saying, I’ve been on a bird kick and, so far, I have painted a Gold Finch, an Oriole, and a Blue Jay. Painting outside on sunny days, listening to the birds sing along with the breeze in the trees, has been very peaceful and grounding. I imagine I’ll walk my mini palette down to the park or the woods one sunny morning and have a seat somewhere to see what inspires me. Even if I didn’t paint anything, it would still be good for my health.

I’ve been getting used to transparent watercolors again, relearning them. I worked with watercolors often when I was in high school (which was 40 years ago), but I hadn’t touched them since then, until recently. So, we’ve been becoming reacquainted. I’ve done a lot of gouache work, which is an opaque watercolor, but transparent watercolors are a different beast, a very different process than gouache. You work from light to dark and there are many interesting textures and effects that you can achieve with transparent watercolors. One also needs to get the hang of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques and the different viscosities of your paint and/or washes and how your paper reacts to it. To do it well, there are things to know, and I am reknowing it and even learning some things I didn’t know.

My tiny palette has eight wells to fill, so the colors I chose were lemon yellow, yellow orange, bright red, crimson red, forest green, ultramarine (blue), burnt sienna, and black. The set came with three fillable water brushes of various brush sizes. I can make a fairly fine line but have to be careful of how much water is coming out of the brush. A sheet of paper towel is handy for regulating that.

I continue to make small watercolor ACEO art cards. I’ve sold a few too. The cards have been great watercolor practice. I listed six more cards on eBay since my last blog post, and right now have six more nearly ready to list. Below are the cards I listed most recently, at the time of this post. With this batch, I started giving the cards radius corners, for a more finished look.

The art cards have been a lot of fun, and a nice change of pace. They’ve been a fresh challenge and have kept things interesting for me. As an artist, I enjoy the freedom to work in many different mediums and dimensions. Each one is conducive to creativity and learning, and has something to offer my art.

I have an 18 x 24-inch acrylic painting on my easel which I would like to get back to. I started a timelapse video of it, months ago, but I set the painting aside and started dabbling in the small art cards and my eBay store. Spring planting has gotten in the way a little bit too. ‘Tis the Season.

That’s what’s new. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. Enter your email address in the window below to subscribe and receive email notifications when I post updates here.

The Spring 2025 Art Events Kickoff

marjasall — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 19:39:24 +0000

Three weeks ago, my wife and I attended the 2025 KUSD district-wide Student Art Show at the Kenosha Public Museum (Wisconsin, of course). That’s the Kenosha Unified School District. The show ran from March 15^th to April 13^th, 2025, at the Kenosha Public Museum. Last year our niece had a piece of art in the show. I blogged about that. This year she had another piece of art in the show, so we went and checked it out. It seemed that it wasn’t as large as last year’s show, but there was still a lot of outstanding art pieces to see. On display were paintings, drawings, mixed-media, collages, sculptures, pottery, weaving, silk-screening, photography… all variety of medium. I love looking at all of that creativity from so many young artists we haven’t yet heard of. Some of the pieces were inspiring and gave me ideas for techniques that I would like to try myself.

I took a lot of photos. I kept it to the pieces that stood out to me the most. Enjoy!

Another highlight of our visit was a lone male mallard duck that was hanging around outside by the entrance, greeting people. He didn’t appear to be injured, only muddy. He was hanging out there and wasn’t afraid of anyone. He walked right up to us. He didn’t behave aggressively, as if he was protecting a nest nearby. He just stood there calmy among our group as if he was participating in the conversation. After a few minutes of us talking to him, he walked away back to the flower beds. The museum is right on the lakefront, by the way. He didn’t appear like he was in distress or needed help. Maybe he was used to being fed and was expecting something to eat? It was nice meeting him, anyway.

I have finished at least three pieces of art since that show. I posted a blog entry a couple of days ago called “There’s A Place…” That post is about one of those pieces. And I have created two graphite drawings which I will write about shortly. I’ve also added several new prints to my web store. One is a limited-edition print of 10. You can check it out here.

Thanks for stopping by and taking time to read this! I hope you enjoy the photos. I enjoyed this show very much. I enjoyed the previous one and I’m sure I’m going to enjoy the next one as well.

Saddling Up!

marjasall — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 03:00:06 +0000

Hello! I am still here and I’m still making art, but sometimes I have to do other things.

I started another acrylic painting back in July and I worked on it for a couple weeks and then ended up putting it down (a familiar story from me) and I didn’t pick back up on it until February of 2025. I just finished it this past week. Better later than never! I made a time-lapse video of the process (see below), as some folks like to see the process of creating a piece of art, and some folks just find it relaxing to watch. I enjoy watching them myself.

I’ve named the painting (simply) “Dryad’s Saddle”. For anyone not in the know, “Dryad’s Saddle” is an edible shelf mushroom that grows on dead decaying trees. You will easily find them in wooded areas (obviously). They’re also known as “Pheasant Back”, because the pattern on them resembles the feathers on a pheasant’s back.

The small young Dryad’s Saddle are tender and the most edible. My wife and I harvest Dryad’s Saddle from a decaying tree stump in our own back yard, every Spring and Summer, and she cooks them up in a frying pan. The larger they are, the tougher and woodier they are, so you want the small young ones which are softer. Freshly picked, they smell like cucumber or watermelon rind, and when chopped up and cooked in a skillet with some butter, garlic, and a dash of salt they fry up much like any mushroom does. Its texture reminds me very much of cooked chicken (the tender dark meat) and it has an earthy flavor. I’ve read that they are high in vitamins, protein, and anti-oxidents and are very healthy to eat. There is a lot of information on the internet about Dryad’s Saddle and how to prepare them.

Also in my painting are hosta plants. Did you know that hostas are also edible? You can eat the shoots, the leaves, and the flowers. There’s lots of info about that online as well. Perhaps I should have named the painting “Forager’s Delight”.

This painting has gotten my creativity going again and reminds me that Spring is just around the corner. We’ll be seeing lots of “Dryad’s Saddle” soon, and I have already started working on another painting! I hope we’ll be seeing more of those on a regular basis too!

Prints of my new painting “Dryad’s Saddle” are now available in my store. This open edition hand-signed giclee print is digitally printed in high resolution with waterproof archival pigment inks on 19 mil, 260 g/m2, archival textured matte velvet fine art paper, 100% cotton fiber and acid free.

Thanks for reading my blog post!

April is the time when nature gets creative

marjasall — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:26:11 +0000

…and I have followed her lead. Earlier this month my wife and I went to the Kenosha Public Museum to see the Kenosha Unified District Wide Student Art Show. The exhibition featured artwork from area grade school kids, elementary through high school. The exhibit was open to the public and ran for three weeks, but this particular night that we went was the meet and greet event. Our niece, who is in high school, had am art piece on display in the show and we went to support her and to see all of the cool art.

There were sculptures, paintings, and drawings, oh my! I also saw a lot of really unusual and creative mixed media pieces. It was a really nice event. It was very colorful and inspiring. I smiled the whole time. I saw so much outstanding work there, but one of the most enjoyable to look at was the work from the elementary school kids, K-5. The imaginations and the colors were outstanding. Cute kitty cat and pumpkin drawings in a variety of styles and scenes. As I said, it made me smile and it was a fun event. It also reminded me of when I was a youngster and had artwork in art shows, and the work was shared, acknowledged, and sometimes rewarded. I think I might know the kids’ excitement that had work in the show. I also got to revisit creativity and art through the eyes and mind of a young person. I think I still have some of that kid in me when I create. I must. I hope so. At any rate, here are some pics from the meet and greet event. Maybe you’ll see what I mean. Check out all of that enthusiasm for expression on display, and the adventurous ideas.

I’ve made several new paintings over the past few weeks. I began filming timelapse videos showing the creation of these paintings. My first painting was a garden gnome standing next to some black eyed susans. I painted it with gouache paints on paper and named the piece “The Gardener”.

The next one, also gouache on paper, was a grasshopper.

And the painting after that was some bleeding heart flowers, which I painted on a larger stretched canvas with acrylic paints.

The bleeding hearts was a painting that I had started about a year ago, but I lost interest in it as I instead got into a different painting. So I decided to break it out and finish it finally, and I made a timelapse video of it, and started a YouTube channel to collect the footage and more timelapse videos of my paintings, for people that like that sort of thing. I think it’s interesting to watch a piece develop and morph in fast motion. I try to put nice music to the videos or some pleasant ambient background noise. You can watch the full videos from beginning to end on my youtube channel at www.youtube.com/@marjasallproductions. Subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive notifications of when I post new videos.

These new paintings I just mentioned, “The Gardener”, “A Grasshopper”, and “Bleeding Hearts” are now available as archival prints in my store.

I put together a slide show several weeks ago of most of my current collection of artworks. I think it’s an entertaining way to view the collection quickly in one place. Enjoy!

I’m about to begin work on another yet-unfinished painting and time-lapse video. I want to keep the creative momentum going. It’s another painting that I started about a year ago and I’ll reveal what it is when I release the video.

April is the time when nature gets creative. It’s planting season and nature comes back to life. Summer will be here before we know it. The warm weather gets me outdoors more, which means more energy, and that I will be surrounded by inspiration and new things to paint.

That’s all the news I have for the month of April. Peace to you and have a blessed day! Thank you for reading my blog!