Christmas snowflakes

Another year scoots by, and a new one awaits. The theme of this year's Christmas cards was snowflakes, inspired by a book of snowflake patterns to crochet.....which I did in November, and then looked for ways to use them for card making. I planned to print a background with smaller snowflakes, and then attach the crocheted ones on top, or overprint with them. I even bought some silver printing ink... and off I went, with several variations resulting.

Here are three different versions :

 

 

 

 

 

I like the difference in quality of the marks left by using the crocheted snowflake as a stamp, over the more precise lino cut versions. I also played with different papers - tissue, soft crepe, off-white drawing paper as well as straight onto bright white card. The top card was the crocheted snowflake rolled with silver ink and printed onto crepe paper, then cut out and stuck onto card and an extra glittery snowflake added in the centre.

Painting at Ray's - September sunshine

This year's painting week with Ray Atkins was during a sunny week in early September. I managed 4 paintings, not all of them finished.....

Firstly, our brief was to find something colourful and start with that colour on the canvas, then completing  the painting with the surrounding colours. This is my work, which took a good couple of days to finish:

Then the sun was too strong to be anywhere other than in the shade....so I looked out passed the rose arbour to the hillside beyond, but kept struggling with the placement of the different objects in view....so first of all I went back over the ground and covered it in a mid greenish grey and tried again.....but again things seemed to jump around, so I gave up painting and scratched the position of the main components. The following morning, this is how the painting appeared, and I really liked the combination of slightly misty colours with the roughly drawn lines...I couldn't bear to touch it, because I knew I'd lose that air of mystery, so here it is:

Next came the hydrangeas - in the deepest shade, so their pale flowers seemed to glow. I liked the pattern of the leaves - large, green leaves that overlapped each other in pairs, with pale green stalks, and the tiny flowers that flopped over the edge of the flower centre.

And lastly, a quick study of just two Hydrangea flowerheads

More baskets

Every week I'm learning more. Here are photos of the latest project- a real basket made completely of hazel. I love the fact that you use all the branch, the bark for weaving and the inside for the ribs. But it does take hours and hours and is quite physical.

 

 

 

 

Sculpting in soapstone

A friend organised for a group of us to try out sculpture at a local centre for marble sculpting. Luckily for us, Francois Xavier suggested we start with soapstone, since it is much softer to work, and therefore easier for beginners.

We each had a few tools and a lump of soapstone, and were encouraged to make whatever shape we wanted with it. I couldn't immediately identify the final shape, but I knew I wanted to contrast the rough stone, and some areas of polished stone, so I just started at the top and moulded parts of the block, using chisels, files and lastly sandpaper. Here is the result....more of a study than a finished artwork, but I really enjoyed the process - responding to the structure of the stone, working with my hands, creating different textures, discovering the marks you can make on the stone too.

Patchwork attempts

I think the last time I attempted to sew anything as patchwork was when I was about 12 years old, so this was a big experiment. I wanted to cover the oven gloves, and fancied the log cabin motif because it seemed easier than most. Here's the result:

It's inspired me to do more...next come cushions, I think. But I don't want them to seem too neat and ordered, so I'll need to add a bit of madness somehow.....

Winter views

I've just finished this painting, which I made as a present for a friend.

There's something weird going on with this photo - it's come out all wide!

I needed to work fast, and indoors, so I used acrylics, which I haven't touched for some time. It's great that they dry so fast, and infuriating that they do so, because there are colours on the palette which I want to come back to and they're no longer viable! I found I wanted to use the paint almost like watercolour - lots of layers building up the relative tones.

It took a while to finish, and I had  to keep stopping because the tones and hues changed so much over the course of the weeks, the mountain went backwards and forwards from all over very pale to strikingly black and white, to barely there palest grey, to pink at sunset. And the fields were at times so bright green I couldn't get the paint bright enough to match! Here's an earlier photo of work in progress.

 

That's more like the format of the actual canvas....I took it with a camera, and not with my iPod...maybe that's why the two photos are such different shapes??

Lino prints - the final versions

Last month I eventually finished the final layer of ink on the lino prints of my courgette design, and here they are:

The result has something of the look of the Arts and Crafts movement.  Not exactly my intention, but interesting to find how particular colour combinations can have such strong resonances.

I eventually chose a brick red as the final colour, to contrast with the turquoise/ green of the previous ink. Here's a print of the red on its own, on white tissue paper:

 I've found that tissue paper is a good for lino prints, especially as I don't have a press. The image transfers well, and I like the translucency of the ground. And if I dampen it before I print on it, the surface gets wrinkled, and so does the print - great texture!

 

Just to finish on a different note, I tried a bluer lilac mix, which makes for a colder image overall, but I don't dislike it.

Baskets

I've been learning how to make baskets. Here is my latest effort, which started out as half a gourd, with small holes evenly pierced around the top (cut) edge, then twisting bundles of rushes and securing with raffia threaded through a large needle, I ended up with this:

The shape more or less created itself. It reminds me of making coil pots from clay, and also of some of the pots we'd seen in Australia, created by the Aborigines. I'm sure it's a technique that stretches back into the mists of time. It's so flexible, and self supporting, I wanted to continue coiling and coiling, but ran out of rushes!

Christmas trees

I've been very slow at updating my blog.... not helped by a new PC to replace the old one which has all my photos on it, and then behaves in strange new ways which leave me baffled. So here are some attempts to get back up to date!


For Christmas cards, I'd been thinking about a simplified Christmas tree motif for a while, and couldn't find anything that satisfied me....until I cut off the corner of an old lino block I found on the shelf and voila! It's perfect!
(sorry - having real problems with new PC Windows 8 - can't find where to rotate photos!)

 

I've set up a mini production line on different shades of tissue paper. I like the quality of print I get on tissue paper, and the imperfections and wrinkles that naturally occur from using such fine paper.  And I knew I wanted to vary the ink across the surface, so no two prints are identical. I like that!

And then when I mount them on card, they look quite jolly!

 

Then I used the offcuts to make more trees (same non- rotational issue!)

 

 

So that was my bit of pre-Christmas creativity......



 

Lino prints

I started cutting a lino block way back in the Summer, when my courgette plants were young, and the first fruits were forming on them. But I didn't get round to printing from the block until recently (the start of some damp Autumn weather). I'm doing this in stages - I think it's called reductive printing. Here are some of the prints. After an initial yellow/orange print, I cut out some more and printed in leaf green:

For the third print down I dabbed a bit of red ink straight onto the lino before printing. I like the result, but don't want to ruin it by printing over it, so it may stay as it is...

I want to make a virtue out of the fact that I can't get perfect prints without a press, but you get more texture in the areas where the inks are thinner. I'm hoping that after several more overprints the layers of ink will still be visible beneath the final one.

Now the third stage of cutting and overprinting.  I also wanted to try printing on tissue paper. The finer the paper, the easier to get a print. At first I thought I'd go for dark blue/green:

This print was directly onto yellow tissue. I hope that there's enough detail there not to miss the earlier under-printing.

Then something told me to try a lighter, more turquoise ink:

 

 

I'm pleased with these. Just one more layer of colour to go...which I think might be a rich purple, but then again I might change my mind....

Pastel Peppers

Here is a drawing I made in my sketchbook. The peppers had been lurking in the fridge for a while. They needed eating, but I wanted to record their concertina wrinkles before we chopped them up.

There's something very rewarding about drawing a still life of fruit in soft pastels. There's some affinity I find between the rich colours of both, and their textures.

A cot blanket for Albane

Some more baby knitting:

Audrey had started knitting a baby blanket, but didn't have time to finish, so I quickly and happily volunteered to help out....

She'd made a section of garter stitch, which needed to be valued, but I couldn't continue that for the rest of the length, so I added some rows with holes, then I thought of making patterns with holes, hence the date of birth and name, finishing it off with another row of holes and a pink ribbon.

Not the kind of thing I usually do, but appropriate for the task and hopefully will keep her warm as the nights draw in....

September painting week

It's taken me ages to get round to blogging, but better late than never....

I went up to Ray's for a week of painting in early September, and here are the results:

My first painting was of the sweetcorn flowers against the frame for the vine behind. We'd been talking about how to depict space and depth..not my forte!...but I was pleased with the forms of the drooping leaves and the composition of the crossing stems.

Here's a photo of the painting as I worked on it, in Ray's beautiful veggie garden:

And this one is unfinished. I was looking at some of David Hockney's landscapes and decided to try and work in heightened hues of flat colours, and I was pleased with the way this was coming along, but ran out of time...now I just need to finish it! (Same old story!)

Something for a little baby

A friend has just had a baby, a few weeks early, so she's very small, but healthy and happy. I wanted to give her something..and this is what I knitted for her:

It's only about 10cms long, but looks huge next to its new owner!

Inspired by my veggie patch ....

... I thought I'd sketch some of the forms and sights that fascinate me. So here goes:

First off is the courgette plant. Giant leaves with a mosaic of green and white, bright yellow trumpets of flowers, which so quickly twist up on themselves, holding on to the fruit itself, which can grow almost while you're watching it.

Working from sketches, I'm planning to make a lino print. Here's a rough drawing to work out the colour layers for the print:

Here's the lino, first cut:

Northern Spain

Here are the three 'sketches' I made on my iPod from our trip to Northern Spain. The more I use it, the happier I am about the lack of accuracy of the lines. I think it adds life to the image. The first is a much over-rated, tourist infested village of Santillana, full of honey coloured stone buildings.This was the view from our bedroom window.

Santillana del Mar

The nearby caves at Altamira are famous for the paintings on the roof of the cave, but the visitors were damaging the atmosphere, and therefore the paintings, so the Spanish have built a full-size, faithful recreation of the caves which you can walk through and see how the paintings appeared. There is a whole 'ceiling' of paintings, all jostling for position.  



Cave paintings at Altamira



Along the roadside there was masses and masses of broom in full flower - so here are those accents of yellow colouring a lakeside view.

Our journey took us along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Every day we passed pilgirms with backpacks and walking poles plodding along, sometimes on paths parallel to the road, sometimes just beside the road. It's 800kms from the French border, which is weeks of walking. As we continued towards Santiago my admiration grew for all those people who had the determination to press on, day in, day out making dogged progress under the hot sun, or in the rain. Here's a Santiago cake we bought in town - I loved the decoration; made with a stencil, I assume.



Santiago cake


As we were turning back North to cross the Pyrenees we saw clouds rolling over the tops of the mountains. A strange site above the arid, sun-baked plains.

David Hockney exhibition in Bilbao

Last month we went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao to see the David Hockney exhibition which had transferred from the Royal Academy. We were so lucky; instead of having to confront heaving crowds of people, it felt as though we had the place to ourselves! And that's just what you need to see the huge landscapes he's been painting.

I was just bowled over by the intensity of the colours he uses, but also the range of different palettes he employs for the different seasons or light conditions.

In the video documentary he talks about how everyone's perception of a place or a view is literally coloured by their memories. Interesting that many of these works are painted in the studio, from charcoal sketches and photographs. And so the colours he's choosing are quite personal. I'm sure I could sense that emotional connection he has with the places he's painting.

I'm also drawn to his use of multiple canvasses with slightly different viewpoints which together make up one image, but with a slightly broken-up, patchwork quality which reflects how we take in and perceive places.

And the exhibition went on and on...watercolours, sketchbooks, smaller scale works done on the iPad.


Then there was the iPad stage by stage construction of a couple of his works. You could see how he started, what he added when, how he changed the format half way through and then the final work.
I must practice a bit more with our iPad... I mess around on the iPod with the Doodle Buddy app, which is a much simplified version. Somehow limited choice means you can't get too fussy, which makes for clearer, simpler images. I wonder whether having so much more choice about everything on Brushes will muddy the outcome - it will certainly freak me out!

Growing veggies

As the weather warmed up, I was pulled into the garden by some invisible veggie-magnet. I'd spent dark winter evenings planning what to plant where, and from April onwards I've been creating a real 'potager' based on my plan, but somehow it never quite turns out how I expected. The plan has all the planting so far marked in coloured pencil.

And here are a few pics of the plants themselves:


A red pepper and aubergine between salad leaves




Courgette and squash



Borlotti beans, french beans, mangetout peas and broad beans

So far I've learned that there just isn't the space to grow everything, and that it's better to have a larger amount of plants all growing at the same time, to get a single meal's worth of a crop at once (other than salad leaves etc), rather than lots of smaller amounts of different things, or successional sowings, both of which I'd prepared on my plan.  I'm learning as I go....Soon I'll have to start another plan for next winter/spring.....