We have a colour challenge over at Less is More this week… Your clean and simple card should feature blue, pink and white to enter our gallery. Now, my cards don’t necessarily fit the guidance for ‘simple’ or ‘easily reproducible’ but I find them rather pleasing and am running with them! Here’s my first card for the design team inspiration page and below is another I made:
One of the joys (and tribulations) of being a mixed media artist is that you have a great deal of choice when coming to the question of a favourite technique. The fact that the latest challenge at Less is More is conventionally a card craft project helpful narrows down the choice. I found it hard to pick a favourite, so here are two cards based on the effects I most like the results of.
I’ve just taken delivery of my latest goodies from Craft Label (Trimcraft). First up is a set of acrylic paint pens from Nova. These are water-based, non-toxic and suitable for just about every surface. They are also water-proof on glass and ceramic when baked (though not dishwasher or food safe). The pens have a 0.7mm extra-fine tip and there are 15 colours in a pack, including metallic gold and silver.
Over a year ago, I was given a bag of cobbles/pebbles by a friend who was hoping I would use them for stone art. I’ve finally got round to using some to decorate with the paint pens…
It has to be said that the coronavirus isolation rules haven’t affected my working life unduly. I’ve always worked from home being lucky enough to have my studio at the bottom of the garden. Unfortunately, it has meant that I’m no longer able to host studio guests which has led to some quiet evenings. At some point, I’ll look into providing remote access via IT solutions, but there’s no one to watch at the moment.I’ve restocked some of my laser-cut mini- tags in the hope that we get to have a Christmas stall again this year. Yesterday, I drew a mandala and then transferred it to Illustrator to convert it to a 3D layered laser-cut version:
I’ve had a couple more goes at layering 3D mandalas. Making the layers sometimes causes some head scratching, but as I have been used to editing layers in other design work, it’s not all bad. The first two are based on my hand drawn mandalas, and the second is based on a photo of a real snowflake.
If you care to remember, I have been drawing mandalas from scratch. I’ve also been expanding my skill set designing and cutting on my Glowforge laser cutter. I’ve seen several 3D mandalas online where the design has been cut from layers of wood, with variable complexity and some true artists whose work must have taken days, if not weeks, to do.
My first attempt at a layered mandala, using 1.5mm thick birch ply:
Often, it’s the designing that takes the longest time to do when working on a new project. In this case, it was researching the Scottish Gaelic text for the first notebook, making sure what I wanted it to say really was ‘right’. The notebook has laser cut birch plywood front and back, 1.5mm thick. The Celtic knot is cut out and has a red page behind which isn’t very obvious in the pic. You’ll have to take my word for it that it is a rather effective technique. The text is quite heavily engraved which gives a dark burn that won’t rub off.
The second notebook builds on my A7 notebooks and features one of my hand-drawn mandalas. This took a fair while to engrave as I used a 340 lines per inch resolution for a crisp image.
These are A7 kraft covered notebooks with laser-etched designs using my own mandalas. It took a little experimentation to get the right settings dialled in, so the gold covered one is a bit of a botch. I engraved it with too low a setting, so there was a small etch, but no colour. I painted it with gold acrylic, dried it and then tried all sorts of techniques to colour the etched areas only. There was scraped acrylic paint (messy and didn’t stay put), antiquing cream (the same) and finally, I went back to a golden oldie which I haven’t used in a long while – tar/bitumen. This settled nicely in the grooves (though not entirely uniformly) and polished off the top surfaces. I like the aged look.
I’ve noticed recently that on drawing lines, such as writing or outlining, I’ve had a noticeable (though very minor) intention tremor. Now, this may be medication side effects, but I decided it was more likely to be lack of practice and a resultant deterioration in fine motor control. Noticing it in the first place may be due to my perfectionism as well! As a result, I’ve started drawing mandalas using my fountain pen, both for their repetitiveness/meditative process and for retraining my fine motor muscles. Here are the results so far, in date order. I’m pleased to report that after just six to seven hours of drawing over eight days, the tremor has all but gone.
Continue reading I’ve drawn a few more mandalas and, during breaks from doing my accounts, I have done some colouring in. This time I seem to have played with tints and shades of the same colour with some grey and an accent colour thrown in here and there.
Stained glass window? 
Feels like the middle is draining away…
Simple and blue. 
I’m not sure of this one, I think the light pink is too dusky.
I’ve used Promarkers to colour these mandalas – alcohol-based ink pens allow blending and layering and smooth gradients.
