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Thursday 21 April 2016

The Baby Portraits are Keeping Me Busy

I went through the book that records the artwork I've done and flipped to the baby portraits. Since November 2015, I've finished 5 more portraits. I can post 4 of them for you to see but the fifth hasn't been given to the parents yet so I won't post a photo of it.

I will have another one to start on in a week or two.












Thursday 14 April 2016

A Year of Neighbourhood Drawings

Today I sketched on the last page of my neighbourhood sketchbook. I flipped back to the front of the sketchbook and noted that the date on the first page was April 16, 2015. Today, being April 14, 2016 means it took me a full year to finish this project. Now when I go through the sketchbook I can see how the seasons developed, when certain plants bloomed, what the weather was like on certain days, when we had snow and what wildlife I saw. It is not a comprehensive record but it is pretty to look at and it was a way for me to practice my live sketching or sketching from photos. It will also give me inspiration for other things such as my fabric cards, paintings or journals.

Last week I sat in the local Tim Hortons and sketched the interior of the store. It is still difficult for me to do this in public but no one bothered me and I enjoyed the challenge.



This week I drew a Smart car I saw sitting in someone's driveway. I think they are so cute but I don't think I'd ever ride in one.


If you are interested, I've posted a short slideshow of some of the pages in the sketchbook on Instagram.

Thursday 7 April 2016

Two Art Quilts Mailed Out

In the last few weeks, I have mailed out a couple of Art Quilts. The first was the SAQA Benefit Auction Quilt that I blogged about a while ago. In that blog I posted a picture of my plan.



I worked fairly closely to the plan but changed the leaves and put 3 in instead of 2. I started first to quilt the boards of our deck which are weathered and most of the paint has come off except for some small spots.



This background is just gray fabric that I quilted with lines to mimic wood grain and screws and boards. I then fused the blue gray "paint" on top.


Here, I am playing with the placement of the leaves. These are the base colours of the leaves and the shadows under the leaves are black organza.


 Here, I have fused other fabrics onto the base leaf fabric to give the leaves form and dimension and then I quilted them adding veins. I felt that the composition was a little heavy on one side but I didn't want to add another leaf. Suddenly, I thought of something I always see on the deck along with the leaves and went outside in search of snail shells. I found 3 and made sure there wasn't anything live in them by pouring boiling water over them. When they were dry, I used my glue gun to attach them. When I was satisfied, I put a narrow border around it and called it done. It is 12" X 12" and is called " First Fallen Leaves". It is posted on the SAQA website and if you want to see it and all the other beautiful quilts that have been sent in, go to saqa.com , and on the menu line click on Artwork, then Benefit Auction and finally View the Quilts.


The other art quilt I mailed out is the "Reflections of the North" which was accepted for the SAQA Show "My Corner of the World" being held in the Stratford Perth Museum in May. I thought I wasn't allowed to post photos of it but when checking the mailing instructions, I noticed that there was no restriction on posting so here is the finished quilt.