Travelling sketchbooks - bottled up inside

This month I struggled a bit. E passed on a beautifully-drawn image of the oceans full of life, but blighted by microbeads. She was really cross about it. She had drawn schools of dolphins and shoals of fish, gambolling playfully, but carrying their ultimately deadly, man-made poison innocently inside. Very serious, and difficult to move on in any trivial way I felt.

What did it make me think of? Tubes, tubes full of spherical objects. Tubes blocked up with things. Here is my page of notes. It goes off in quite a few directions, but I suppose that's the point of a brain dump.

Then I started to focus on the things we don't or perhaps can't say that are trapped or stuck inside us.

 

 

Words jammed in our throats, feelings that we perhaps never even dare to put words to. And so I thought about a way of showing this visually; how the conscious or unconscious might be somehow embodied.

I suppose it naturally seemed red to me, our insides, both physical and symbolic. The background is layered tissue paper glued down with matt medium. I spent a while jotting down phrases that I thought might be difficult or impossible to say, not all negative by any means; things that might just be left unsaid, particularly to people who matter to us.

First I laid the phrases out like precious seams emerging from the geological strata of our bodies, then I tried tubes. I encased this very personal treasure in gold and studded it with 'jewels', partly because I was inspired by the Saxon artefacts at the Ashmolean in Oxford, where I spent a happy hour recently looking at garnet-studded gold dragged out of ploughed fields all over Britain, before it even was Britain, and it seemed to fit both metaphorically and visually. I first outlined the 'tubes' using gold acrylic paint and then beefed it up a lot by using Gilding Flakes in Variegated Red by lovecrafts.com. The flakes are stuck on using Gilding Glue, also by lovecrafts.com and it's worth looking on YouTube for information about using both of these. I do think the gold is particularly rich looking.

In the sketchbook that I passed on, I wanted to create a form that looked vaguely like lungs, the organs that keep us alive - life-giving tubes that might get blocked. I do think that, like not being able to breathe if something is blocking our lungs, if we don't find a way to nourish ourselves and our relationships by finding a way to say some of the things that we don't say, we do at the very least live a little less.

Easter crafting 2016 - quirky felt rabbit decorations

When you have a group of mum friends and their daughters keen to do a bit of Easter crafting, what can you do?

Make it an excuse to invite them all round to make felt bunny ornaments, of course.

This is now the third Easter that we've done it. I really hope the kids don't lose interest for a good few years yet. On the other hand, nothing to say that the big girls can't carry on....

Travelling sketchbooks - misty mornings

As the year progresses, it's very chilly in the morning, but the extremely mild winter has meant a riot of early flowering bulbs. Daffodils, crocus, primroses; I wonder what will be left for April..

Nevertheless, misty mornings remain and my daily trips out of the countryside towards the metropolis mean undulating landscape laid out below the winding road and, if conditions are right, banks of low-lying mist, sometimes brushed with gentle early sunbeams touching treetops across the valley.

This must have been just below the surface of my conscious mind when I got the recent travelling sketchbook.

B, who loves whimsicality had gifted me pages of Rapunzel's flowing hair with witches clutter stuck into it. It curled up and down the pages pushing itself into every nook and cranny!

I started to think about other things that swirled atmospherically, that might mean something to me:  wisps of bonfire smoke rising in a helix, closely intertwined snakes and rather more ethereally, the morning mist, settled in layers in the stark winter valley bottom close by.

So first I did a quick sketch coloured with my Inktense pencils, the first remembered impressions indicating where I might be headed.

Then I decided that watery coloured paper might be quite nice with white spaces for the low-lying cloud. I cut random landscape-ish strips of cartridge paper and sloshed it with the dying embers of watercolour paint from the unwashed mixing trays in my palette to give graduated colour. The lumps and bumps are supposed to give a nod to trees and other shapes hardly emerging from the landscape.

 

Then I had a go with paint sample strips, cutting them up and reassembling them and then dabbing them with gesso 'mist'. Hmm..not so successful that one.

 

So I went back to more slosh-coloured paper. The speckles are residual paint from the undersheets that I was working on and I liked the effect so I left it.

This was in the travelling sketchbook that I had started and that I will get back at the end. We all got our 'own' sketchbooks back on this pass. I wondered if this idea had been too simple, but I liked the idea that I would at some point have the original back. That seemed a good enough reason to conclude that, simple or not, it was the right piece to pass on.