WI Nutcracker - FIMO accessories

Tomorrow we are off to the ROYAL OPERA HOUSE!!! to see the Nutcracker on wonderful subsidised tickers from the WI. I know!!!

There will be a photographer there to photograph the kids' Nutcracker-themed accessories. So I did one too.

Was my Sugar Plum Fairy supposed to be ghoulish? It somehow headed off in that direction with a FIMO body pierced with knitting needles....

...and then I somehow got into the vibe with a piece of hand-dyed felt, some coloured silk husks and a few sequins.

Hope it doesn't make any little children cry...

Texas - Roundhouse: stupendous Spiteri

Sharleen Spiteri was on fire at the Roundhouse, London, on Sunday Dec 13th 2015, leading Texas in a romp through the last 25 years.

All the best tunes, maximum energy, the woman is glorious.

My favourite, Halo, came out early and the party started. By the time we got to Inner Smile, I was just completely happy.

I love a good front woman, one born to it, in charge and having a ball. And then, by all accounts, walking home afterwards.

Travelling sketchbook - swirls and curls

The sketchbook I received had a line of mandalas, portals to an inner world...swirls, coils, a circular maze....where would this take me?

As I sat at the hairdresser reading a magazine a day or so later I glanced up, and in the mirror I saw curls and swirls....outer curls and swirls.

What a great thing a tiny notebook is for capturing all manner of thoughts...

That weekend I got out my gelli plate to do some printing including some circular motifs, just to see what happened.

I used an A5 plate and also a round one, which when I stood back a bit, just seemed to beg for a face or two to peep out from the stamped curls. With some sooty black lashes, I was taken back to my original inspiration at the hairdressers: the lowered lashes of ladies being pampered.

Travelling sketchbook - catch up The First

In August, I received a lovely buttery watercolour of a peachy sunset with some inky geese flying towards the horizon.

It reminded me of birdwatching at RSPB Mersehead, the barnacle geese swooping in from Svalbard on an autumn day, and of all the birdlife that we see when we go up to Dumfries & Galloway and the Solway Firth.

I thought I'd wait until we got up there, to see what particularly inspired me. A week later, the flowers were a sight to see, particularly the roses, pinks and purples of the willow herb, which I decided to have a closer look at.

I'd never noticed how red the spent pods were.

As I crouched beside it, looking intently and scribbling with my Inktense pencils, raptors circled high overhead and in the end, I wasn't sure whether I watched them, or whether they were watching me, nestled into the ferns and grass, like a pottering mouse or a tiny bunny....

Glittery FIMO ornaments - WI crafting heaven

After a bit of a break and a new computer, I feel bound to share my WI crafting paradise last night.

Thanks to our Glorious Leader Sam, and oiled with tea, wine and cakes, we rolled, printed, cut, baked, and ribboned, with these marvellous results.

 

 

 

Travelling sketchbooks - dancing round the maypole

I seemed to travel through liquid time and across the vastness of continents this month!

I received an Aborigine-inspired dot piece from M in the latest round of sketchbook passes.
It made me think about what we keep of what was here before, traditions that are constantly under threat of being swept away and the wistfulness of times that we can never quite recapture.

It reminded me of the Plains Indians exhibition that I had seen at the Met in May and their depictions of their traditions on skins and in ledgers.

Top - Grand Robe (Musee du Quai Branly), bottom - ledger art, (Lansburgh Collection)

I thought about depicting one of the oldest English dances, the maypole dance, originally a pagan fertility dance, but with echoes of the Plains Indians war and green corn dances.

This dance is still done, most beautifully, at gatherings in our village by successive generations of our primary school children including my goddaughter, often on limpid June afternoons in dappled sunshine. I had just seen this and it was clearly still insistently tapping away at my head, waiting for its moment.

I take lots of photographs at these events, as little H skips in and out of her friends in their white pinafores.

I also thought about other ancient traditions, particularly pictorial. After a visit to the British Museum, to the Indigenous Australia exhibition, I thought about using raark, a typical simple and somehow very sophisticated way to fill backgrounds. At the BM, I also decided to pay my respects to the bas-reliefs from Nineveh, following news that IS have probably destroyed a lot of these important pre-Islamic archaeological pieces on site in what is now Iraq. So many interesting solutions to pictorial representation, quite apart from the ancient historical aspects. I liked the trees.

I had a coffee and started to think about how this might all come together:

OK for a sketched idea, but difficult to refine, I felt. Too complicated. Too many differing influences. Typical result of an over-excited brain.

I sketched a few dancing body shapes from my maypole photos:

Not very brilliant but giving enough ideas for movement and dress shapes.

Next I thought about the light and shade, and just how this might pan out on a sunny afternoon, in terms of dancing forms against sunlight. And then I found the wavy corrugated wrapper from an old coffee cup. Hurrah!

Oh dear, the dancers looked a bit like angels doing synchronised swimming in an aquarium....

I had done some backgrounds with my Gelli Plate and I thought these might work, suggesting late afternoon dappled sunlight.

This is my final piece for this month's travelling sketchbook. A little distance from where I thought I might be, but I think that's the beauty of the process.

Travelling sketchbook - life drawing - a slice of my life

In May, the sketchbook I received had a picture of a clock and I started thinking about time and what it might mean for me.

I started off thinking about the aging of the brain through time (don't ask!).

Then I went to the Hay Festival and did a mind-blowing two and a half hour life drawing class with the Royal Drawing School. It was marvellous: scary, intense - an 'in for a penny, in for a pound' type, rollercoaster of an experience.

We started off with charcoal and a paper towel and 3 minute warm up sketches. The class was very mixed in terms of ability and it moved fast: you either pitched in, forgot yourself and had fun, or I'm guessing it could have been a pretty intimidating time.

I must say, those experiences get me buzzing.

After our 3 minute sketches, we did some (very..) slightly longer 5 minute work and then went into three ten minute sketches on the same sheet of much larger paper, the first two rubbed out to leave a ghost image. Very annoying to rub something out if you think it worked, but all in the service of the exercise in hand!

Anyway, suffice to say, it was fab and I'll be doing it again next year if the chance arises!

And - I decided to put a couple of the rather cronky 3 minute sketches in the travelling sketchbook this time. Six minutes of my life. Time enough. It needed to be the actual sketches or it wouldn't have been the actual time! (By the way, I'm absolutely not suggesting that these sketches are any good, but if you don't pitch in, there is no way, you'll improve, to my way of thinking.)

I decided to 'underframe' each piece with three timed minutes of an account of the class, to visually frame each stuck in, folded sketch (which inconveniently enough, didn't fit the page: that's art for you). So twelve minutes of my life, in aspic in this sketchbook.

Not the most immediately visually impactful pages, but hopefully a slightly different way of encapsulating a creative process.

Travelling sketchbook - New York Skyline

In April, the sketchbook I received included some sweet, quirky Lowry figures and elegant studies of parallel lines, mostly in monochrome.

I was thinking about music on staves and then we went to New York for a week, and on our hotel roof looking at the skyline, I mentally turned the staves through 90 degrees....

So, having made little visual notes in my journal,

I started collecting bits and bobs from wherever we went: business cards from where we ate, art gallery floor plans, menus - any old ephemera really.

This resulted:

The musical background is an NY cliche, I know, but I love both the piece and the Woody Allen film, Manhattan. The 'water' is envelope interiors from post that came when we were away.

Travelling sketchbook - from rose bowl to poppy seedhead

My next trot round the travelling sketchbook circuit saw me receive some very creative still life pages. Hmmm...how to take this on...I wondered.

Suddenly one shape leapt out at me, looking for all the world like a poppy seedhead, that wonderful sculptural shape that so many people are clearly inspired by.

I remembered having some dried seedheads from a couple of years back, collecting dust in my 'room'. Perfect for giving me a bit of sketching practice first of all, giving input for something else later on....hopefully.

So I set to work. Here are some sketches. I guess the important thing is that this stage really made me look at the seedheads to really understand their structure better. The idea being that my final image will be more real and more 'of me' because of this observation. In theory.

Then I happened to go to the Hiroshige exhibition at Winchester's Discovery Centre (on until May 24th). The exhibition is a series of woodcuts from the marvellous Ashmolean's collection. The subject matter is classic Japanese woodcut material: views at the 53 stations along the Tokaido Road, done in the 1830s. Well worth popping in to see. And the exhibition is free!

So as I mooched along I stopped in front of this

Utagawa Hiroshige - 53 stations of the Tokaido Road - Ashmolean collection

I really loved the delicate rendering of the depth of field in the early morning fog using different muted greys. Maybe I can use that somehow in my poppy image using printed seedhead silhouettes, I thought, rather ambitiously!

Later, I started to carve some adigraf shapes, based on my sketches.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a gelli plate from Gelli Arts. Following some on-line tutorials I also carved a polystyrene plate for the background and some OHP film too. First efforts were mixed and pretty unpredictable, but a lot of fun to do.

This was my favourite. Sort of like looking through poppy seedheads into the setting sun.

My travelling sketchbook page was this (I thought I needed to be brave enough to sketch directly into the sketchbook).

Viral in China - Tibetan couple's wedding photos

'BBC Trending - The wedding photos that captivated China'

Look at this link that was on the BBC website on 18/4/15: a Tibetan couple's set-piece wedding photos marrying the modern and the traditional. It seems Chinese social media users have swooned. Ironic given China's usual treatment of Tibetans

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-32353687

The whole set is here.
http://www.zhangzishi.cc/20150410zh.html

They are really worth a look - just beautiful and such high quality.

Cheeky chicken egg cosy - Easter crafting

Yesterday, some girlfriends and I sat down with a little Easter project: to make a Good Friday chicken-shaped egg cosy! It was precious crafting time so a couple of daughters were sent off on an Easter egg hunt and the other, a tiny tot, set to painting her first blown egg.

The Big Girls disappeared into a lovely zoned out creative space for a couple of hours...

Here's the result of my various cuttings and stitchings.

Unfortunately, my seam allowances didn't allow for the way felt sits round an egg...so I added a 'gusset' so he could breathe!

What a handsome fellow!

Travelling sketchbook - dragonfly wings

The next sketchbook I received was from E. Here is a tiny section of her second piece, together with a list of what it brought to my mind, after a few days of letting it sit.

I loved the idea of iridescent sections of dragonfly wings, the sun glinting off them.

So in my back book, I had a little go. I found some textured wallpaper and some origami paper and dyed them with Procion MX dyes. I tried a bit of stitching with silk thread to suggest the tiny sections on one, but while I liked the effect, the silk just got too tangled up, so I canned that and used three strands of regular embroidery thread - much better. I smeared the second with glitter, which looked lovely, but gets lost in the photograph.

This is what I put into the sketchbook that I passed on. I rubbed the dragonfly 'bodies' with Inktense sticks, just to give a bit of texture. Think I preferred the composition of the top one, somehow. Anyway, fun!

Travelling sketchbooks - the eyes have it!

We have started a travelling sketchbook group. Nine of us. The idea is to get us using our sketchbooks, to get our creative juices flowing and to do it with similarly creative people.

Each person in the group starts a sketchbook off by doing a double page entry. They then pass the sketchbook to someone else in the group. Each subsequent person does a double page spread and, here is the crucial bit, using as their inspiration something, anything, from the previous person's work. Anything. The subject, a colour, a shape, an association, anything.

How does the first person start? Everyone picked an image that they liked from a pile of magazines.

Here is what I chose:

I let this roll around in my mind for a couple of days. I was thinking 'what do eyes see? what do eyes say?' and 'thick kohl' and 'scary eyes'.

Other eyes that came to mind were these:

My first exploration in my back-up sketchbook took the first two pictures, with the image of the burqa-ed woman a very powerful one for me. I carved some adigraf and used it to print with acrylics.

But the image I liked took the red of the Steve McCurry image (Procion MX dyed paper) as well as the burqa-ed eyes. This became my first image to pass on and the one closest to the original.

But I also wanted to give the Clockwork Orange eye a go too, entirely subverting its original, terrifying meaning. Again, adigraf helped and I carved out a stamp of both a positive and negative of the eye motif.

First I had a play in my back-up sketchbook, but it was all floating around a bit too much.

Then, in the sketchbook to be passed on I did this, which seems to work better.

So what I pass on to the next person will be

This spread first indicates what influenced me from the image that I began with. Then it moves  gradually further from that image into my own space. Ooh, I had such a nice time.

And never one to miss an opportunity with some unused paint and a couple of new stamps, I banged out some tags.