Origami fun

My paper loving friend Val had a new origami book show me when I was at her place last week. She had paper ready for us to play with, and I made a little flotilla of boats,

A penguin and a fish.

More Japanese brush art at Box Hill Community Arts Centre

This morning I attended another workshop on Japanese brush techniques - this one was called 'Japanese SumiE Ink Painting' and our tutor was Junko, who was just as charming as Miho was last week. The ink and brushes we used were the same as last week, and the technique very similar but this time we were painting pictures instead of letters. After showing the students examples of her own beautiful work, Junko demonstrated how to use the brush to create different effects on the paper. After we'd practiced for a while, she encouraged us to paint bamboo, which she said was the easiest one to start with.

Then she showed us how to paint two fish. I was too heavy handed with the ink, and my poor fish are much darker than they are meant to look.

Then we could choose what we wanted to do. One of Junko's paintings was of a fluffy cat, and I asked if I could copy it and she gave me her painting to work from. I am very critical of my own work, as well as being impatient and wanting to do something perfect the first time, so I wasn't overly pleased with my version of her cat. But she was delighted with it; I was the only student who did the cat, the others were doing flowers and birds.

Japanese Calligraphy workshop

On Saturday morning, I attended a two hour workshop on Japanese calligraphy.  One of my friends did a workshop with the same tutor a while ago, and she enjoyed it very much.
I would love to have attended that class, but it is on the other side of town, and a bit too far for me.  So I was pleased when I heard about the workshops Miho was doing this weekend closer to home.
The morning workshop was about brush painting on canvas, and the afternoon one was on making greeting cards.

Miho is a charming lady and an excellent teacher.  She provided all the brushes, ink, paper and canvas for us to work with, and she was very patient with our efforts to handle the brush correctly to get the brush strokes right.  After we'd practiced various brush strokes on paper, she gave us each two stretched canvas boards to do a final  painting.

Here are my two - a Japanese letter meaning "Happiness" and a very basic plant (which I think I have placed on the wrong angle for this photo, darn  it).  Miko provided the red seal to stamp on our canvases to denote the finished art.  She insisted mine was good, but admitted that it takes many years of practice to achieve excellent results.  As it does with any calligraphy!

Button crafts.

I borrowed this book from the library some time ago and have renewed it three times - now it has to be returned!  I have been tempted to try and find a copy online, but decided not to, as I have so many craft books already, I must stop buying them.  Instead, I set out to make as many of the projects in the book as I could; luckily only  a few appealed to me.

This was the first one I did - a stretched canvas, painted lilac, with squares of fabric and matching buttons glued on to it.  Not a spectacular piece of art, but fun to do.

From this page -

 I made two of my own versions.

The bag in the picture below inspired me to convert a green supermarket bag.

By sewing a patchwork piece on to the bag and embellishing it with ric rac and buttons. (As you can see I haven't finished sewing on the ric rac yet - it is by hand, and such a tedious job).

I have nearly finished an owl like this (mine is red), but I won't post a photo until I've finished it, as it looks odd without the feet.

I've come to the conclusion that the best way to utilise library craft books is to actually do some of the projects right away, instead of photocopying them and filing the copies away for 'another time', as the other time never happens in most cases, and you end up with a fat folder of fading photocopies.  
The last project in the button book that I wanted to do will have to wait, as it will take a lot longer than any of the above items.  It is a map of Australia drawn on to a piece of strong fabric, with each state coloured in a different colour by using buttons to fill the areas.  I've started off by tracing a map of Australia from an atlas that happened to have a map exactly the size I wanted.  So at least it is on paper, and ready for me to transfer to fabric when I make time.

Creative envelopes

On the previous post I featured a book that I've borrowed from our library, and as I have renewed it twice, it is now due to be returned, so I made a last ditch effort this weekend, to make as many envelopes as I could, to keep and use as a reference if I want to do them again (and I'm sure I will, they are so much fun to do, and people love getting little surprises in the mail).
Sorry these are a bit hard to make out; the camera flash caught the top ones, but as you can see, I've labelled each one with the name they are given in the book.

Three ready to to be posted.  One each to my niece's little girls, and one to my good friend Val.

If there is anyone reading this who would like to receive a little surprise envelope from me, just leave a comment on this post, and I'll contact you for your postal address ;-)

A variety of envelopes.

My friend Val is an expert in all kinds of paper crafts, and I often receive fascinating little creations in the mail from her, so when I found this book at our library, I borrowed it.

The first envelope I made went to Val, and she was delighted. She recognised it straight away as she had borrowed the same book from her library many times. I forgot to take a photo of my first envelope, but I've done two since then.

They both involve using decorative papers folded in various ways to make up an envelope that you can write on inside, and enclose photos or other small items. I've going to make a few more of these and send them to Ken's niece's little girls. They love all the craft things I make, and they will get a buzz out of these envelopes from Great-Auntie Gina! I'll write something inside, but I'll also stick kid stuff in there as well - cute!

More paper napkin creations.

Some more CDs covered with napkin motifs, with accompanying origami envelopes.

This box originally held 12 packets of single serve Whiskas cat food sachets.  It was mostly bright orange, so I thought my elephant napkins would look great on it.  I painted over the darker bits with acrylic white paint so they wouldn't show up through the napkins.

I have heaps of old cork backed coasters and placemats that I can't bear to throw out.   With these two coasters, I experimented with modelling paste that I bought recently.   For the one on the left, I applied the modelling paste (it is like a very thick white Gesso) around the border, and painted the whole coaster with acrylic paint when the paste was dry.  Then I brushed the border with gold acrylic paint to jazz it up a bit before I glued the chicken motif on it.
For the elephant one, I tinted the modelling paste with acrylic paint first, using a light brown, and applied that to the border.  Again I brushed it with gold to jazz it up a bit because it looked dull.    Both methods of using the modelling paste are acceptable, but you have to be careful tinting it with colours because it can look overpowering if you use too much.  I'm not going to do anything with these, they are purely experimental.

Once I'd played around a bit with modelling paste and paint, I decided to use one of the canvases I've been buying up cheap at opshops etc.  First of all, I coated this one with gesso.  I wanted to use this napkin from Japan as it is the only one I had left from the packet.  It had a scallopped edge, so I had to lay it on the canvas, draw a light outline around it, and put it aside. (It is not advisable to glue paper napkins over the modelling paste, although it can be done with a special technique)

Next I tinted the modelling paste with blue acrylic paint.  I thought it would be okay, but I used way too much blue, and it came out a lot darker than I intended.  I waited a day or two, then decided to glue my napkin to the canvas.  That was achieved without problems, but I thought the blue surround was too overpowering.  So I used silver acrylic paint and brushed a border around the edge of the napkin, then brushed it lightly across the blue, so the high bits of the modelling paste have a silver sheen.  I'm still not happy with it, and would love to receive suggestions from anyone reading this!

This is the book that I have been basing some of my ideas on. It doesn't use paper napkins in all it's projects, but a lot of them are, and there is heaps of helpful information about things like the modelling paste, which I'd never heard of before.

A different art media.

I like to dabble in all kinds of art, not just painting and sketching.  My sewing/craft room is chockers (overflowing) with fabric, paints, paper, books, magazines, etc. and I play with whatever media I'm in the mood for when I wake up in the morning.  So far on this blog I've just been posting about the sketching and painting, but I've decided to add my paper craft bits and pieces to it as well.

You can do some wonderful stuff with paper napkins and Modge Podge or other PVA glue.  I've been gluing napkins to old CDs and DVDs, pasting plain paper on theback, and making up an origami envelope, posting them to friends, and they have proved very popular!  I've posted some photos of my first ones on my other blog here, but will post any future pics to this blog.   I've just done two new ones today- the Iris decorated CD is for a lady who saw my previous CDs on another forum and said she would love to have one, so I asked her what her favourite colours are and she said purple and lavender.  This was the closest I could get to that, so I think she'll like it.  The paper circles are to make up the origami envelope for the CD. 

Some friends visited us yesterday and brought a beautiful plant in this lovely box, so I took off the labels and used the same Iris napkin to decorate the box for a future purpose!

The other CD is covered with a napkin given to me by a friend who bought a pack of them because she loves this artist's work (Klimt?).  So I did this CD for her.

 Below is an old cork placemat which I have covered with a Japanese napkin, then cut out individual motifs from another Asian-motif napkin, glued them to light card, and used double sided tape to attach them to the placemat.  I found this idea in a book about using canvas boards to make collages, and thought it would work equally as well on the placemat.

Almost a year later....

It feels like ten years since I last posted anything here.  Lot of water gone under the bridge with birthdays, Christmas, deaths, funerals, and health issues.  But that's life, isn't it. 
I didn't finish the water colour classes in the end; Ken got ill and was taken to hospital, and I was also involved in a linens display, and I just could not get my head around learning the water colour techniques.  Dorothy was such a great tutor, and I think she was disappointed that I dropped out, but I assured her it was nothing to do with her teaching - it was all to do with what was going on in my life at that time.

I'd like to have another go at learning how to paint with watercolour, but I'll make sure that nothing else will distract me during the course!  In the meantime this year I signed up for a six week course with the Eltham Living And Learning Centre  - 'Drawing For Fun'.  It sounded like it didn't need too much concentration, and I was right.  The tutor does make everything fun, but she also teaches us a new drawing technique each week.  The first week we just doodled in our own way while she discussed with each of us what we wanted to achieve.  The second week we tried drawing faces from photos that she handed around to everyone, and showed us the basics of drawing head and facial features. Last week she taught us how to understand and use the principles of perspective, and I found that very useful indeed.  Then she gave us a quarto sheet of paper folded in half and instructed us to draw a simple landscape on the left hand side.  After we'd done that, she told us to pass our drawing to the person next to us, and each person then had to unfold the paper, and continue the previous person's landscape in their own way.  A very interesting exercise!  We all had fun with that one, and afterwards we were able to photocopy our drawings so we each had our two versions.

My camera battery has gone flat, and although I have a lovely new scanner/printer, I feel too lazy to scan anything I've done so far, but I will eventually.  It is just so damn hot here and it is sapping the energy out of everyone at the moment.  All I feel up to doing is typing to bring the blog up to date!

Watercolour class 4th week.

I haven't got around to scanning the exercises with masking fluid, sorry (who the heck am I saying sorry to?  I don't even know if anyone is reading this).
Our tutor had us do another still life this week, but using vegetables instead of fruit.  She wanted us to incorporate what she had shown us so far into this painting, so I used candle wax for the white bits as highlights on my shiny vegies.   When she had told us last week to bring our own vegies if we wanted to, there was a bit of a discussion around the room as to who would bring what, and what would be the hardest things to paint.  One girl said broccoli would be, and most of them groaned 'oh yeah' until someone else said cauliflower!  I sat silent, already thinking.  I wanted a combination of colours and textures, and finally decided on a red onion and a brown onion, a zucchini, and a red pepper.  When we arrived at the studio on Monday, Dorothy had already set up an arrangement of vegies, and she said we could use it if we liked.  So after asking if anybody else wanted the broccoli (they didn't!) I added it to my little display.  At the end of the class, they were all very impressed with my broccoli! 

All I had to do was the shadows and a few touch up bits here and there, and I found time to do that today using the photo I took on Monday while everything was in the same position. Dorothy encourages us to do that, so we can finish our paintings later if we don't have them completed by the time we go home.
That damn red onion was very hard to paint - would you believe something so simple could be so tricky?
I still haven't got the arrangement and perspective correct either, although the photo was taken from a slightly different angle to where I was sitting when I sketched it.  Cie la vie...it's all in the learning I guess.

Watercolour Class, third week.

This week we finished our fruit still life, painting the background with washes, and making final touches to the fruit.  Dorothy demonstrated how to create white spaces on water colour paintings, using masking fluid, candle wax, leaving an area unpainted, or scratching away a painted surface.  The last hint came with a warning that the paper will be damaged by that process.

I spent today with my artist friend G, and we sat in her sunny kitchen and played with masking fluid and candle wax to create some interesting effects on small paintings.  I will photograph them and post here shortly, but for now, here is my finished Still Life.  The original is actually a rectangle, but it wouldn't fit in my scanner that way, so I had to crop the sides.

Watercolour class, second week.

Classic still life exercise! Dorothy arranged some fruit on a scarf and got us to paint it. She also provided a tracing of a photo that she'd taken of a fruit arrangement, for those students who felt unable to sketch the fruit before painting them. There were only two of us that didn't use the tracing; I'd done this sort of drawing so often, I felt confident enough to draw the fruit in front of us. I felt the pull of my previous workshop training in acrylics; tempted to use the watercolour from the tube without diluting it, so my colour is very strong instead of being muted and more subtle as watercolour should be. Hopefully at the end of the course I will have re-learned my painting technique! We will continue working on this painting next week, to do the background and finish the fruit.

I did this when I got home - taken from a small water colour picture I had. I plan to use the same sketch to make three more - but of different seasons.

Watercolour classes.

I have enrolled in an 8 week water colour class, and have enjoyed the first two weeks. Our tutor (Dorothy Fields) is an accomplished artist and excellent teacher. She explains the lesson to the students, shows us how to do it, and then gets us to do it one step at a time. The first week she talked about the properties of watercolour paint, the best type of paper to use, how to wet and stretch the paper, the right brushes and how to look after them. Very comprehensive. Then she taught us three ways of doing water colour washes.
When we'd done those, she asked us to paint something over the washes.  I chose to paint pyramids over my blue wash, sand and sea over another, and a simple tree over the fourth wash.

After we'd done those, Dorothy said to 'do our own thing' with a wash background and something over the top, so with the July Sketchbook Challenge in mind ('circles') I painted these balls and circles. Doesn't represent anything - just painted doodles I guess!

June challenge.

The theme for Sketchbook Challenge in June is Urban Sketching. I was a bit puzzled by this until I had a look at the examples, where I saw that artists had sketched their environments (many interpretations of this!). I don't know if I'm going to have time to do much sketching this month, so for my contribution to the Challenge Flickr site, I posted my sketches of the Eltham Trestle bridge and the house on the river in Warrandyte, which I did in April and May, and posted on this blog.

Sketchbook Challenge for May, and other stuff.

The topic for the May Challenge is Fruit and Vegetables. I lined up a banana, pear, mandarin and tomato to make a nice contrast in colours. This is in watercolour pencil, a medium that I have had very little practice with, so I've got a lot to learn. I took the photo below so I could make some improvements to my sketch without having to leave the fruit on my desk, or go and find it again when I wanted to work on the picture.

An artist friend has offered to set me a challenge, and have a look at my work when I've done it. She said to paint someone in one colour acrylics, using light and heavy applications of paint to create shade and depth. This is my husband asleep on the sofa last night. I had a lamp behind me, otherwise the room was in darkness, so it was pretty hard to see his features. But White Feather thought it was great! The cat was curled up beside me on the couch, so I painted him as well, but that was not successful at all.

I invited another artist friend to come over so I could paint her portrait - also in acrylics. It was great having someone who is an experienced portrait artist, to critique my work. She offered points for improvement as I went along, and while my husband says it still doesn't look like her, I'm still pleased with the result. I had planned to leave it as black and white, but G. suggested bringing one colour into it, and as she has auburn hair, I chose that to use.

Sketching in charcoal.

The more I use charcoal pencils to sketch, the more I like the results.  Here are some sketches that I've done over the past month.  The first one of the open door was my contribution for the theme 'open' for Sketchbook Challenge's April challenge.

This is a tree stump in our back yard.  When I showed the MOTH, he stared at it and said 'what is it?'  I replied  "never mind"....

The old trestle bridge in Eltham.  I'd done a water colour of this bridge last month, and was disappointed in my efforts.  I think this is a bit better, but when I compared it to the photo I took from the same spot on the day we were sketching, I realise I still have lots to learn about perspective!

The MOTH and I went to a Native American workshop recently, and one of the activities was learning to dance Apache style.  Ken and I sat that one out!  So I took the chance to do a quick sketch of some of the others dancing, with the Indian in his regalia standing with his back to us.  It is very difficult to draw people when they are moving around - all the books say you need to practice constantly to get it right.  They are not exaggerating!

Watercolour experiments and quick pencil sketches.

Today was such a beautiful autumn day in Melbourne, I decided to try some watercolour sketching around the town where I live.  Found a table on the outside balcony of a local cafe, ordered a coffee and muffin, and away I went.  This took me about an hour.  I really need some lessons in this medium!!  But I enjoyed doing it, and some of the people who noticed what I was doing came over to have a look.  People who consider themselves unable to paint or draw are always complimentary, which makes me feel good! 

After I'd done as much as I could to the first painting, I moved across the park to a spot where I could draw the old wooden trestle rail bridge. I've taken heaps of photos of this bridge, but never tried to draw it before. Next time I think I will try using charcoal, as I seem to be able to capture shadow and shape better with that medium than with paint and brush. There were trains coming and going all the time, so I included a bit, but it is woefully out of perspective; in fact it looks nothing like a train! Next time I'll just do the bridge.

Yesterday, the MOTH and I spend an hour waiting to see our doctor, and I took advantage of the time by sketching people in the little book I keep in my shoulderbag for that purpose. There was a lady sitting in front of us who helpfully kept still the whole time (not knowing what I was doing), but the two young men across the room caught me when I was about halfway through drawing them. One whispered something to his mate, and they both looked at me while I tried not to look at them - ha ha! Ken was chuckling, and he told me they changed their position when they figured out what I was doing.

Last acrylic painting, recent sketching.

The final class in Acrylic painting was held on March 26th.  The previous week, Michael suggested we paint anything we wanted to on the last night, and he would be there to assist us on a one to one basis.
I decided to work on my American Indian portrait, and Michael praised my work in progress.  I was quite chuffed!  I almost finished it on that night, but it needs a bit more work on the finer details, so I won't post a photo of it here until I've completed it.
In the meantime, I've been using pastels, charcoal and pencils to do some sketching.  This one of some of our hens basking in the sunshine in the back yard was done with my cheapest colouring pencils - I use them if I'm just messing around or having a practice run.   I've never seen hens lie down like that, and it was quite tricky to capture them in those poses.

Last night, there were sleeping bodies all over our house - one cat on the bed (Tiger), the other under a chair in the dining room (Topsy) and the MOTH stretched out on the couch.  I thought it was a good opportunity to draw them all in charcoal while they were unaware of me.  I captured Tiger before he woke up, but Topsy opened her eyes and glared at me when I crouched down to draw her, and all I could get was this quick sketch of her cross little black face before she got up and moved away!  By that time Ken had woken up and wasn't in the mood to be a model for my scribbles, so that ended my session.

Today (Monday) I went down to the Yarra River in Templestowe with one of my arty friends (Val) and we spent a lovely couple of hours sitting under some shady trees, practising our drawing.  Val had a book of "how to paint for kids" and it had some interesting exercises on drawing and painting trees (one of my worst themes) so I dallied with those for a while.  The first page is done in Derwent pastel pencils -

 And the second page in water colours.

 I decided to get serious then, and drew this house and trees on the other side of the river, using charcoal to sketch it first, then added colour with the pastel pencils.