29 faces and Chagall

 Day one, 29 faces ( Well two for the price of one )

Marc and Bella, acrylic on paper ( A tribute to Chagall)

Well today is day one, and I'm starting the challenge with trepidation. Will I manage to post 29 faces? I will do my best, but life has a habit of getting in the way!

My first piece is watered down acrylic painted on heavy watercolour paper. I stencilled a little ink on first. It is inspired by my recent trip to Liverpool and the WONDERFUL Chagall exhibition at the Tate.

 My piece is based on the beautiful painting 'lovers' my favourite in the whole exhibition. Chagall painted a series of pieces of himself and his wife Bella together after they were married. The figures often merge into one, showing how much in love they were. Quite beautiful!! If you want to see the original click HERE

The Tate Gallery Liverpool docks

My daughter Briony had some fun with some of the other exhibits at the gallery!!

We had a wonderful afternoon tea at the Sapphire lounge. Instead of tea the teapots were filled with a brandy fruit punch . Very decadent for a Thursday afternoon, but I was on holiday!!

I found a great little art shop on bold street called Rennies. I love exploring new art shops!

We also found a fabulous Moroccan  restaurant called Kasbah. They served proper Moroccan tea out of little cut glass cups....

And served Baklava ( A gorgeous dessert of little pastries)

Ended the trip with a look round the cathedral..

Which was being prepared for a wedding, a very impressive wedding by the looks of it!

Anyway mini holiday over and back to work...

Linking up to the 29 faces challenge starting HERE

Also linking up to my friends at Paint party friday

Summer of color grey and pink

The summer of colour combo this week is Charcoal grey and pale pink.........


Well I started the week with my previous post of a shopping bunny and now for something completely different!

A sketchbook page inspired by the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
 Born in 1868 he was a Scottish architect, designer and artist. He worked during the time of the British Arts and Crafts movement. I have many lovely books on the subject and I used one on his furniture and leaded window designs as a starting point for my page.


The garden is full of pink flowers in bloom at the moment so I painted a quick watercolour page with my inktense pencils while sitting outside, then stencilled in a little scroll down the side with modelling paste.

  Linking to Summer of color

Paper dancing

 APR Heads, shoulders knees and toes!

Paper Dancing

This week over at the  Artists playroom Jenn set the weird and wonderful task of interpreting the song we all sang as children into some form of art.

 

I decided not to go down the route of painting my toes, I don't like them much and don't really want to inflict them on everyone else, nor do I really know that my knees would make good art, so..
Here we have Head, shoulders and arm...sort of, I just had fun with my box of paper scraps and gesso. Changed the tone a little digitally My figure looks like she is dancing, perhaps to the song :)

I use left over ice cream tubs to store my paper scraps, nothing is wasted,things always come in useful!

Fishing for dreams

 The theme for this weeks Collage obsession is Emerald..

Fishing for dreams ( mixed media on canvas )

 After last weeks battle with yellow a refreshing change.

Emerald is a colour I love; It evokes feelings of calm, space and clarity. My collage is inspired by dreams. For me Emerald is a very dream-like colour.
I really wasn't sure how or where I was going with this piece, it just sort of evolved.

I started throwing vibrant Emerald paint over the canvas...just to get a feeling for where to go.

Then I used my Gelli plate and a piece of netting to print some paper

I tore up the paper into fragments and used them in my collage.

I used pebeo liners to raise the surface in areas.

After last weeks fight with the tulips I feel much calmer and ready for a creative weekend :)

Gelli printing

My First experiments

I received my first Gelli plate a couple of weeks ago and have been experimenting to see what it can do...

some of you may know all about Gelli printing already, but I only recently discovered this exciting way of printing.I found it quite hard to find a Gelli Plate in the UK. In the end buying one from The Craft Barn. The best place I have found for a bit of Gelli inspiration is Caroline Dube on you tube.

Very soon I was Gelli printing everything and anything..

I found that thin craft acrylics worked best..especially with the bubblewrap imprints.

With the gelli plate printing papers for collage work is so easy!

And a little addictive :)

And what to do with all the printed paper??

A background for a collage, I drew out the figure and stuck her to the gelli printed collaged background.

Added some hair...

And stencilled a little gilt leaf and added some acrylic paint. I actually think I have overworked it as I much preferred seeing the jelli printed paper more clearer. So next time I will do less, to achieve more...

Links to Paint party friday
Gelli print party

Homeland

The North coast of Scotland ( on a sunny day!! )

My Homeland.

Inspiration Avenue theme this week is 'your home town' the place where you were born....

As I posted in Sundays blog I am recovering from an arm injury so am unable to create anything new for a couple of weeks :( so instead have been looking and sorting through photographs of past work and fond places....

I was born and brought up on the north east coast of Scotland. Caithness is a wild and windswept county at the very edges of the UK mainland. The wind whistles in from Shetland and the Arctic circle with little to hamper its progress as it is a relatively flat area with huge skies and high sea cliffs. Later my family moved to a croft on the Island of Skye, off the north west coast of Scotland. This is a very different landscape. One of enormous heather covered mountains which reach down to to sea. It is very beautiful and now no matter where in the world life takes me I think of it as my home.

My sketch books contain many pages of inspiration from these beautiful landscapes.I know I love looking at other peoples sketchbooks, the skribbly the better. Here are some pages from mine.

As I usually work in collage I often tear paper and sort colour experiments in my sketchbooks.

And sometimes I experiment with watercolour. I think I used wax resist on some of this page.

And finally these form the basis of torn paper collages on a larger scale.

sligachan river

four very fine cats

 This is my Family croft with my favourite pet cats. It is torn paper on canvas with some acrylic paint.

croft by the sea

Storr

So these are little pieces of my Homeland.... :)

Messing about with maps

Collage obsession maps

The Collage obsessions challenge this week is 'maps'. Rather than complete a finished canvas I have been experimenting in my sketch book.

  I tore up pieces of map relating to the Scottish Highlands, and stuck them into my sketch book. Then I put layers of colour onto the page, purples greens and browns.

 

Then once dry I cut the sketchbook page into squares and pasted them in a grid pattern and added gesso. I like the way maps seem to have thread like qualities with the red A roads wriggling through the patchwork landscape. I used red ink to go over the roads and then used red silk thread to form a grid around my map shapes.

Feeling fizzy

In the Artists playroom 

The artists playroom challenge this week was colour. What a blessed relief!! Almost at the end of dark and dreary January thank goodness. This mixed media collage is very summery, it is a combination of discarded unsatisfactory watercolour paintings which I ripped up and combined with gesso and acrylic paint as well as a few flower petals. The words Pretty fizzy jumped out at me from a magazine, if summer had a sound it would be' fizzy'. Summer bees, fizzy lemonade...roll on spring....

pretty fizzy

 I combined my favourite colours, Magenta, cerulean blue, purples, pinks and greens with a rich shimmery glaze.

The Jigsaw space

Number 4 = The four panels of Twomby's Hero and Leonardo

My recent visit to the Tate and my awe of Twomby's huge canvas Hero and Leandro got me thinking about scale, size and how sometimes the smallest marks can mean so much. Hero is a vast piece, it is in four sections and tells the mythological tale of Leandro, engulfed by the waves as he swims across Hellespont to reach the beautiful Hero.. The 1st panel is full of energy the last mournfully sad and empty. Quattro Stagioni also continues this sense of time, with life and vigour moving slowly away..

Cy Twomby(Hero and Leandro)

The jigsaw space

 The Jigsaw space is a small canvas 20cmx20cm I built it up with many layers. My starting point was as always an altered image. This time a photo of a bag I brought back from Morocco, I changed the colour and using Dylon Image transfer applied it to the canvas..

Moroccan bag

I then began adding washes over the top, using the stripes to give the feel of a landscape. Only once I was happy with it did I block in the figures with gesso, then using very small mosaic pieces of paper filled in the spaces...........The faint lines of the jigsaw were drawn on and washed over giving only the faintest trace....Finding that bit of missing jigsaw piece may seem impossible, but keep hunting you never know :)