In the summer months I tend to be out in the garden keeping up with the weeding, dead-heading and blogging about what’s on my mind about the state of the garden and the wildlife (or lack-of) that I find there. The pigeons have been pecking away at the honey-suckle that is trying to grown over an arch so I made a wind-spinner that moves and spins in the breeze just to see if that might deter them a little. It has worked so far but maybe they will get used to seeing it there and start pecking at the leaves and buds again.
There are plenty of you-tube videos on how to do this but you can pretty much make it up as you go along and make it as big or as long as you like. It uses up any left over yarn, doesn’t take too long and you can make them for charity. This is made with acrylic yarn left over from a blanket I made ages ago. I might make the tassel for the next one longer and not quite as thick, or make some other little dangly thing instead of a tassel.
I am finding it difficult to get motivated to anything right now. The weather is just cold, wet and miserable and the craft room is too cold to work in. I am in a bit of a rut so I went through some old art journals and sketchbooks that I have for inspiration. The next few pics are from an old small 9cm x 14cm hard cover sketchbook (maybe a Talens Art Creation book). They are quite good little books but as I open them out to do double pages the spine takes a bit of a bashing. I used quotes that I liked and tried out multi media and methods. So I am feeling inspired to do more of the same.
There is a youtube channel called ‘Put some colour in your life’ so using mainly acrylics and pastels and some posca pens I made this colourful double page spread.
Colour in your life.
For this one I collaged some clips from magazines and an old page from a book. I highlighted the words ‘craft’ and ‘tinkering’ in the book page as when I am feeling a bit lost I like to just tinker and play in the craft room rather than go full steam into a project.
Lost.
One of my bug-bears of painting is that it uses up a lot of paint and supplies which is expensive and I used to worry that I was wasting not only time but all of my art media if things didn’t turn out well. This quote helped me change my attitude to that way of thinking. Paint is only wasted when it stays in the tube – so true.
Wasted paint.
I think the next quote was by Suzanne Vega. ‘Money can buy: doctors but not health, clothes but not taste, make-up but not beauty. ‘ More collage work using collage papers and a napkin £20 note.
Money can’t buy:
Always worrying about things not turning out right will stop you doing anything, so you have to focus on what can go right and not what could go wrong.
Focus on right.
Don’t strive to be perfect but just making progress is good enough. Embrace imperfection uses acylics and stamps. I used to use this little book to list all the media (stuff) that I had so that I wouldn’t buy doubles but that never worked so I painted over the pages to use it as an art journal instead. Here I have left some of the writing showing through the paint. It is a nice wee reminder that it isn’t about what you have, but how you use it that counts. Wabi sabi comes to mind as the Japanese find beauty in imperfections.
Embrace imperfection.
Fear of the blank page (or anything else in life). this quote sums it up nicely. ‘Fear is not the enemy. Waiting to stop felling afraid is’. I don’t know where some of these quote come from, maybe a pod-cast I was listening to or a TED talk? Mainly acrylics in this one and a bit of collage and stamping using found objects.
Fear.
Using napkins with bright autumn leaves on and gel medium, I added this quote; ‘Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.’ Oh if only we could just let things go.
Let things go.
So I still have plenty pages to fill up yet just need some more quotes.
I love Michael Lang’s large abstract paintings and decided to have a go following one of his you tube videos and I enjoyed learning his blending techniques although I didn’t exactly master it. I found it difficult to keep my circles round and my straight lines straight but it looks ok from a distance. I also couldn’t get the drippy technique – partly due to the buckle of the paper (he used a flat board) and I just couldn’t quite get the right consistency. I used mainly acryics and acrylic medium, but also pens and finished with gel pastels to brighten a few areas. The camera didn’t pick up the aqua colours and made them look a bit blue.
Well I think I am finished the painting. It will probably sit in my folder and I will pull it out every now and then to see if I want to add anything else to it.
More playing with my acrylic paints and watching you tube videos. It was good fun and getting me back into painting again. I painted it in my large art journal, then took a photo, shrunk it and printed onto photo card, and this time to make a card I put it inside a white aperture card.
I painted this one a while ago but have only just got around to getting it framed. Being quite textured acrylic it was just attracting dust so here it is framed. I was using a tutorial I found on youtube by Peter Dranitsin and I really enjoyed painting it. Oh I must do more painting soon – where does my time disappear to?
Lately I have been dabbling in a variety of techniques in my quest to learn to paint and here is simple floral landscape that I painted using Angela Anderson’s tutorial (who got the idea originally from Yvonne Coomber).
It is dead simple, a bit messy and time consuming but a lot of fun.
