More Challenges, or There's Gesso on my Breakfast!

Note: Don't miss it - I sneaked in my 100th post a few days ago, and have offered to design a flag for one randomly selected blogger who leaves a comment. I'll be doing the random drawing Saturday - the selection that is! The flag creation will be anything but random.

Challenges are a cool part of the Blogosphere. I had so much fun with Michael5000's Oregon Flag Makeover Challenge (here's the whole sordid story of my flag design process, in reverse, in case you missed it) that I've been keeping my eyes peeled for other creative challenges.

Two that caught my eye are Bigezbear's photo of the week challenge - this week's theme was "Breakfast" - and Jen Worden's weekly art challenge. Jen's project this week involved taking a magazine image, outlining it in black marker, then filling in the colored areas with gesso. I really liked the effect, and decided to try it out.

Here's My Breakfast:


The whole eggs-in-toast thing is a big comfort food for me. Spelt toast. Organic, cage free eggs. From happy chickens! The mug of coffee is not in the picture, but can be assumed. I was probably trying to drink from it and take the picture at the same time.

And here's my gessoed magazine image:



It's from Real Simple magazine - a photograph to illustrate an article on headaches. Really, I only buy Real Simple for the pictures.

And now, here's two great challenges that taste great together!

I love the effect of the hard outlines and selective gessoing on the photograph . . . and I'd love to hear about any cool creative challenges out there in the Blogosphere that you are particularly fond of!