Just to amuse you a bit!

See what's snuck onto m'bookshelf!  Well what else would you put on the bookshelf of a painted quilt? 

A little quilting

I don't seem to be able to get into a proper work routine at the moment and so progress on the exhibition pieces has been slow to say the least. It's not that I've been lazing about you understand, just that work's mostly been in front of the computer, for DMTV or for Fingerprint. All good, but I really need to crack on. I have pinned the birdcage top onto the longarm. It looks very tame after Edwina's sushi!

The top section of background needs darkening so I'm doing that with the thread. By quilting very closely it should add the tone that I'm looking for. I'm using a rayon thread for the quilting so the lines are quite fine which will complement the marks in the pen drawing. At the moment I'm just filling in the background but soon it'll get more interesting as I do the hand and the birds below it.

As the sun finally shone today I did sneak out to play with the new lens I've got for my camera. It's great for close-up shots and so I've been kneeling on the lawn looking for insects and willing butterflies to pause long enough, but also practising with easier targets like this apple blossom which is so pretty at the moment.

Sushi update

I have been working with my dyed and painted fabrics inspired by sushi. It is always a major decision to  take the scissors or rotary cutter to any fabric and make those first incisions - goodness that sounds like major surgery but perhaps it's a quilter's version! Anyway, I took the plunge and started to cut them up. I had always intended to mix and match two of them so this is the first one starting to take shape.

The background was painted with a chisel nibbed pen filled with dye. It was most satisfying drawing these large free form spirals. The coloured circles were also painted with dye using the same pen. I like the wasabi green and the salmon pink! These circles were cut from a larger painted fabric and since arranging them as above I have bonded each shape onto felt and these will eventually be appliquéd to the background once it has been quilted.

The shapes are intentionally not perfect circles to echo the slightly irregular shapes of the sushi.

I love the marks made by the pen as it is moved across the cloth. These were such fun to paint.
The next stage will be to quilt the background so that I can decide how to apply these shapes on to it. I think I shall quilt it with large swirling spirals, we shall see!
Speak to you soon
Edwina

Two inspirational images

I just thought I'd share these two portraits with you. They are by an artist called Andres Barrioquinto and I think they are stunning.

I love the Japanese overlay of images and love the colours. Very clever.

If you like looking at paintings there's a fab blog here  which updates almost daily with new art work. No words apart from artists statements.

a bit more drawing...

Hope those of you who had a long weekend enjoyed it! No such luck over here, just a regular working day for us Canadians. I did manage a bit of drawing last week and finally got around to taking some images.The weather has been so grim, it was a bit like taking images in the dark but this weekend things finally brightened up so out with the camera.
 

We worked on quicker drawing this week, these above were 2 minutes each ( I don't get much done in 2 minutes!) and the ones below were a bit longer at 4 minutes- though still not a whole body.

and just because it's finally here ...it's spring and sunny, yahoo! The cherry blossoms are finally out, the real ones. I couldn't resist this image of them against a blue sky, we haven't seen much of that this past month. 

   

 Catherine

Happy holiday

Hope everyone is enjoying a well earned break this weekend. I thought I'd show you this.

I could pretend that I knew exactly what I was doing when I painted this today but the truth is I just happened to have a sponge roller saturated with gold paint left over from something I was working on. I always roll the remains of any paint over a page of my sketchbook because I'm too mean to waste it. The grasses are a commercial stamp that I needed to test before I used it on the other work so that's totally arbitrary too. The bird owes something to the beautiful cards Hilary gave us last week (thanks Hilary!) and also a book on Indian miniature painting I found at a library sale for 30p. With all this gold I am definitely getting more blingy by the day!

A bit wibbly wobbly!

Well, here's a little drawing for you. Had I had another hour and not been busy chatting away, I might even have got the elipses sorted and the goblet and bowl looking better. However, I ran out of time - but had fun!!

Great exercise and got my brain thinking again. Not a photo in sight!

 

Leonardo

Hi everyone,

I'm off-topic as usual, but just wanted to share a link to the BBC news where there's a short video tour of the Leonardo drawings that have just gone on display in London.

Here you go:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17907305

Bye for now,
Laura