I often get asked about the header designs on my website — many were created using Texturelabs.org’s excellent free Photoshop and After Effects tutorials. In this Friday Focus, I’m sharing my favourite finds from their site and top tips for getting the most out of them.
At the end of April I accepted a last minute commission for a retirement gift. The brief was to make a piece featuring the recipient’s favourite Bible verse, Joshua 1:9. The time frame was tight, complicated by a long weekend working in London, but I got it done. I wanted to try out a technique I’d seen on various reels. I had ordered some solid wood pieces and they were perfect for this design:
In the first of a possibly occasional, but hopefully weekly, series I am going to focus in on a particular element of my work as a mixed media artist / designer / maker / tutor. I love the varied nature of my work and the projects I get to work on. This post is going to be about lasers, and specifically customising mugs.
This month’s theme for five new illustrations to Bible journal is ‘hope’. I decided to start work in my new NIV Art Journalling Bible and there’s a little mini-review about it below. In part due to the planned review, I used five different media for my colouring-in just to see how the paper behaved. Conceptually, the illustrations were quite tricky as I didn’t want to repeat the same basic interpretation across all five verses. AI came to the rescue here, helping me develop some ideas for different emphases.
It’s going to be a two-parter… We’re underway for this month’s art journaling session in The Studio, taking Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ as our inspiration. When I was putting the sample together, I quickly realised my ambitions for the class were not going to fit the time available so texts went out and my first two-session layout was agreed. My Klimt inspired art journaling layout looks like this:
Apologies for dropping the C-bomb in May! When creating things for sale at craft fairs, it is best to start early. You never know what might crop up between now and the end of the year, and to avoid a last-minute rush, I start early. The door hanger blanks arrived last week, and rather than keep moving them around the studio, I got on with my plan for them.
In my description of The Studio, I refer to it being (as you’d hope) a working studio. Now, not many people get to see what’s happening at any time as I tidy up (or hide) current projects. As you can see from the BTS (behind the scenes) photo below, it’s not always possible to see the work tables. This is what’s on my desk, today, 24th May 2025:
With the start of a more frequent posting schedule on this ‘ere blog, I’m kicking off with a workshop project that I led just before Easter. The brief was to have a craft project a group of retired men (70s-90s)would be able to complete in just over an hour. They are used to me bringing projects they are eventually proud to display, but are always nervous they aren’t artists and worried that they won’t get results I reassure them they will. In view of it being Easter, a cross was a suitable starting point and I decided on a bit of string art:
For this month’s Bible journaling illustrations, I have pulled together five verses on the loose theme of ‘divine protection’. This is the penultimate set of verses chosen with the help of ChatGPT, and potentially the penultimate set of verses I shall be illustrating in my current journaling Bible. The good news is, though, that I have two new Bibles in which to work – more on that in future posts.
Once again, I have used my Color Cubes for palette inspiration (even using a random number generator to pick them) and Faber-Castell Polychromos colouring pencils.
In this month’s art journaling session, it’s all about perspective. During my college course, I completed a sketch with two-point perspective, and it was tough going to get the geometry correct. For the layout in my journal, I stuck with a single vanishing point for my focal point image (see what I did there?). A step-by-step tutorial follows the break – apologies for the lack of video this time, there were technical issues…
