I just love the muted bright colours in this blanket. I can’t tell you how many times I ripped it back when I found I had made mistakes but I finally got there in the end and just before we had that nasty cold weather. Lucy over at Attic24 has a fab tutorial on how to make this lovely blanket with lots of pictures. I think I have now got the crochet bug so I will do small projects often to make sure I don’t forget what I have learned.
My first attempt at a Granny blanket. Many years ago my auntie Lena gave me a small Granny blanket which had become so well used that it was rather tatty and full of hole so I thought at first I could maybe mend it but it a lot of the threads were almost bare so I sought out a pattern that looked fairly easy and gave it a go. I actually started it a few years ago but gave up because crocheting hurt my shoulder and I just couldn’t get to grips with it at all. But I still had all the wool just lying in a bag so I gave it another go and this time I cracked it. I made the squares using the tutorial on lovely Lucy’s blog over at Attic24 then added a wide border. The problem with leaving a project for a couple of years is that when you run out of your favourite shade of wool you find that the makers have either discontinued that colour or you get a different dye lot and the shades don’t quite match-up. I also found that if I kept my right elbow touching the top of my wheelchair tyre then I am less prone to lifting my shoulder up therefore I got less pain. I liked it so much that I went on to make a bigger cosy blanket again using one of Lucy’s tutorials.
I have made a few cards along the same theme. Just by using different colours of Brusho with a matching matt you can achieve very different looks using the same stamp.
I have had this warrior stamp for years now and never quite had any ideas on how to use it until now. I masked it out and then stamped the moon over it and just stamped the tree branches afterwords. With just a little shading to make the moon glow.
I did try to make this zentangle pattern random but it is very difficult not to end up making a pattern, not that it would have mattered in the slightest. I shaded in the wide areas rather than the pointy areas just to get a different look. The photo is taken from above and it looks curved because my card wouldn’t lie flat. Instead of black and white I might do this one again in colour next time.
Another attempt at a mixed media painting Chris Forsey style from his video Pushing The Boundaries of Watercolour. I did try to change it a little from his original by adding a tree stump into the centre of the pond rather than having a large focal tree in the central background but am not that sure that it worked. I used too strong a yellow in the background and the painting in real life looks more like there is a forest fire in the background rather than subtle evening sunlight. I quite like it though and it was fun to paint.
I love watching Chris Forsey paint, in fact I could watch him paint all day, he can take rather ordinary scenes and fill them with vibrancy and life. Over the last couple of months I have tried different painting techniques using a variety of media. Chris Forsey’s video, Pushing The Boundaries Of Watercolour, shows you how he starts with a couple of sketches or photos and takes you through his thinking process and how he achieves his resulting masterpieces. I have tried to follow a couple of his paintings from start to finish while changing them ever so slightly. I do like my results but still see many mistakes. This was painted using oil pastels, watercolour, and acrylic inks on bamboo paper.
Here is my latest attempts at a watercolour painting. I was working through Paul Taggart’s lessons and although I did learn a lot I haven’t really done them justice. I am still a bit heavy handed with the paint and my colour mixing needs more practice. There is so much I don’t like about this painting but in doing it I did learn quite a bit and after all I do need the practice. I used bamboo paper just because it was handy and in a gummed block but next time I do watercolour I will use watercolour paper and maybe even stretch it myself as I haven’t tried that yet. Thanks for the lessons Paul.
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.
So here is my last double page and it is where I have put my contents. The contents are in circles and little circles join them all like a chain. Think of cycles and life cycles, some planetary orbits, mushroom rings, ripples from a single rain drop, flower heads, rock formations craters, and many more. Chains of events one leading to another and some branching off. This was mostly acrylic paint and computer generated text.
That was my last page of my little book. I hope you have enjoyed it and I hope it stands up to it’s tour with the Sketchbook project.