I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of an Apple iPad Pro, and used it this morning in church – not only to do my sermon sketchnotes direct to digital, but also used it for paperless music whilst playing the worship songs 🙂
On a recent trip to Norfolk, I was lucky enough to get to a very reputable cigar and pipe shop and bought my first Meerschaum pipe. For those not in the know, these are carved from a white mineral, and naturally colour as they bake with successive smokes. They’re not cheap, and to keep them safe, they come in bespoke cases. They’re particularly handy for smoking outdoors as they don’t burn through like wooden ones can when wind keeps the embers constantly alight. Imagine then my horror when on first smoke there was a sudden crack noise, and the bowl left the stem.
It seems that every now and then, there are flaws in the mineral that aren’t obvious, and being quite thin walled, the pipe just gave out. The dealer replaced it with absolutely no fuss and I’m pleased to say the replacement pipe is giving me a great deal of pleasure as I have my downtime.
Long story cut short – I now had a pipe case with no pipe. It was too nice to throw away, but not easy to find another use for. I remember seeing Magritte’s ‘Treachery of Images’ and loving the surrealist observation decided to make my homage. Thanks to a friend who is considerably more knowledgeable about French than I am, I was able to add my own tagline: ‘This is not a pipe either’. I plan to send the canvas to the great guys who dealt with me so helpfully, and hope they (and their customers) enjoy the joke.
[Acrylic on canvas, Liquid Pearls Onyx, found object. 20cm x 20cm]I’ve not posted my sermon sketchnotes for a little while, so here’s a compendium of some more. These are all completed ‘live’ as the sermon progresses, and I don’t see anything but the title before I start. If you’d like to listen to the accompanying sermons, they are available on the Whetstone Baptist Church blog.
I’m still beavering away in the studio making items to sell at the church Christmas Fayre. Yesterday I used what I had learnt at Andy Skinner’s workshop I attended last weekend to create a faux rusted enamel frame and stand for this MDF chalkboard. As it happens, I actually prefer the back – some of the paint had seeped under and the ‘chips’ appear much more organic against the gesso undercoat:
It’s that time of year again. That time when you’ve designed this year’s Christmas card, and it’s time to make all 75 cards that are apparently required. So, a mass production line swings into action. Here are some tips:
TOP TIP:
If your Liquid Pearls is misbehaving, warm it up on a radiator or in your pocket. It become less viscous, flowing better and forming nice domes.
As to the finished result – you’ll have to wait and see. Especially if you’re one of the lucky 75 that receives the real thing 😉
I’m delighted to be able to share that I have just been accepted onto the DecoArt Helping Artist program 🙂
Expect lots of blog posts, video demos, art journal pages and workshops using DecoArt Media products to come!
So I’ve spent the last two days making more snowmen, with another trip to Aldi and/or Asda to get more socks and lots more rice! It was a bit of a struggle to work out how to package them in their foursomes. Whatever it was needed to keep them clean and dry. It also needed to give them their space and not get crushed. I considered getting bottle crates – the cardboard ones you find at supermarkets, but was concerned at a) buying that many bottles, and b) the ickle snowmen getting lost in the box and bouncing around too much. As I looked round the studio for inspiration, I saw some paper cups I got to mix polyurethane in – and they were the perfect size for the smaller snowmen. Then I spied a large cardboard tube left over from carpet underlay I think – sawn with a bread knife and finished off with a scalpel, the 2 inch rings cup the larger snowmen well. With some cardboard bracing and taping them together, a perfect package was born. Wrapped in a plastic bag (with suitable warning label attached), a quick curling ribbon bow and dangles, 40 snowmen are ready for their forever homes.
Now all I need is a forklift to move the total of 15kg of rice up to the house, and then to the church Christmas Fayre 😉
I’m still in making mode for the church Christmas Fayre… and inspired by yet another Facebook shared video, I have three snowmen families gracing my studio table, one of which has chosen this as their official Christmas card. Nobody mentioned that sports socks are now rarely just white, seemingly requiring colour splashes to be able to match them up when mixed in the gym bag. Good old George at Asda came up trumps though 🙂
And prices have gone up since rice was tuppenny… with each family weighing in at 1333g of Basics rice, that’s more like 3lbs of rice for £1. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
And the pompoms, despite a wonderful gizmo to help, still took an hour to make and sew on. I think it was worth it though for the finishing sparkling touch.
I’ve made a few key fobs over the last couple of days (yet more to fit on my table for the church Christmas Fayre), using a ‘steampunk’ antique brass pendant with quite a deep bezel. I’ve added a layer of Pebeo Prisme Fantasy Paint first, and allowed that to dry before starting to layer pieces of old computers and watch mechanisms. I used Lisa Pavelka’s Magic Glos UV hardening resin, which is crystal clear and sets within minutes in my Imagepac UV box, allowing layering of the encapsulated items. After a final brim-full top up with resin and a long harden under the lamps, I added an antique brass split ring to complete the key fob.
I’ve been clearing out the detritus that was my study, and found a 16MB flash card – that shows how long the pile has been sitting there as my smallest now is 16GB! On it were a few photos of this project. This is one of my first mixed media pieces – I made it at least 8 years ago. Combining acrylics, UTEE, Liquid Pearls, Stickles, gliding foil (back when it was in sheets not tubs), die cut or punched Bazzil card stock, translucent plastic, and distress inks. I added words later, such as ‘autumn’, ‘fall’ and ‘leaves’. Perfect piece to share at this time of year. As Albert Camus said ‘autumn is the second spring, when every leaf is a flower’.
