birthdays and revisiting still life (now with photos)

First, to get back to what I was saying when I got all tongue tied in that post about the still life painting...

I have a beautiful book from the library 'The Bird King and other sketches' by Shaun Tan. Shaun Tan is an amazing artist, illustrator, writer of children's books. This book is something different, a collection of some of his unpublished work, the doodles that turn into children's books, the sketches for his own entertainment, and drawings from life/nature. Here's a little from his introduction:-
'Some are exercises to simply keep fit as an artist, where the practise of drawing is about learning to see, a study that never ends.'
I think that's kind of what I was trying to say!! He also reminds me that I don't draw enough.

It was my birthday last week, we celebrated fairly quietly! But my 8 year old son made me this lovely diorama, and took the photo (much better than the photos I took.)


Sometime in September was my first year anniversary of blogging, I was intending to do a giveaway to celebrate, hopefully I'll get my act together soon, watch this space!!!

Here are some little xmas decorations I've started making ready for the next craft fair.



*aargh!!!* for some reason blogger won't upload my photos, I'll try again tomorrow.
Monday my photos still won't load, any ideas why???

So then I tried to load the photos onto flickr and they wouldn't work there either. I've never had any problems over at flickr so that made me think there was a problem with the photo files...so eventually I reloaded the photos from my camera and voila!!!!

Busman's holiday

Through August I tried to have a month of trying different/new things, as a kind of break after working towards the craft fair in July. The things I tried were -
handmade fabric books (inspired by a project in Ecobooks),



a scroll book(from a project in Cloth Paper Scissors),


making things with air-dry clay - birds hearts heads



a series of drawings of women artists (I did 2!)



All these projects are in stages of half-finished.Not really a holiday! it was harder than usual to get down to work, I found it really hard to work in an open ended kind of way, and most Fridays I did a little painting too, so that I had the satisfaction of something finished under my belt! Hopefully I might have picked up a few new skills or ways of looking at things along the way. If nothing else I'm back refreshed and have dived into a woodcut. I've done plenty of lino-cuts over the years, but this is my first woodcut. I went to a demonstration of woodblock printing a few weeks ago - using the traditional japanese method, no press required... well I've been inspired to have a go, and should have some photos to share soon.
Hope you're feeling inspired about whatever you're doing!

still life

Recently I did this still life painting 'Tea for Two'.

Here's the real still life set up.


I've been doing lots of little paintings with teacups in them, over the last year. I thought it was about time I looked at a real one...only to discover that I didn't have a proper tea-cup in the house (I always have a mug/bucket of tea!). So I took a trip to the op shop to buy these cups to paint.

I guess photographic realism is not what I'm after in my paintings - they are usually about a memory of something, or a feeling/emotion. Not quite sure what I'm trying to say here!! might have to get back to you...