Commission some art!

Here it is, the Christmas present solution you've been looking for. Commission some art! The lovely Sarah at Popcorn Blue did a beautiful drawing for my anniversary gift to Jeff. Now she's looking for more commissions for Christmas. I can tell you she consulted with me a lot, managed her time well, took heaps of care, and packed the artwork really well. Get her at sarah@popcornblue.com

A nice day's market shopping

Last week at the trash and treasure market, I bought a box of mixed coloured pencils. Look what I got out of it! A whole tin of (about) 90 Albrecht Durer coloured pencils. That's the fancy kind. And I already had a cute Lindt tin just the right size. The couple of short pencils were already in my collection.

Anniversary part 5 - my present to Jeff

Did you do your homework? Go and look at part 4 again

For my present to Jeff, I approached local artist Sarah from Popcorn Blue (I bought a print from her at a design market) to draw us... as animals. Jeff gets to be a dapper meerkat, and I am a pardalote (a cool little bird). Sarah draws a lot of animals, but she was keen to try whatever I suggested.

Our bear, The Oxford Bear, is in the picture too, ready to join us on honeymoon.

Sarah drew this in Prismacolor pencils. I use them too, but I don't get the results she does.

Have a look at Popcorn Blue's site, lots of interesting prints to buy, and you'll find out where she's exhibiting next.

Time for holiday scribbles

Every year when we visit the family in Perth, I take a bit of art stuff with me. But just a limited amount. So when I need a little recharge, I can do a little scribbling. This time, the limited kit includes : coloured pencils, card, round punch, glue, and a few other things.

Here's some fun I had today. Loving the scribble.

Purple paint is weird - scientific proof

I have a big set of Prismacolor pencils in my craft room. They sit in three cups, sorted into warm, cool and neutrals.

I also have a big skylight in that room. the room is very bright, if you leave anything printed there, it fades rapidly!

I noticed today that the pencils are fading! Well, not the pencils, just the paint on the casings of the pencils. And not all of them, just these few. All of the affected pencils are pinky-purple shades.

Since taking the photo, I've reviewed the whole set of 144. The ones that have faded are 929 rose, 931 dark purple, 956 lilac, 934 lavender, 993 hot pink, 994 process red, 1007 imperial violet, 1009 Parma violet, 1017 clay rose, 1029 mahogany red, 1038 neon pink.

I noticed 932 violet and 996 black grape are fine. As are all the other colors!

Just thought I'd record it here to see if anyone else is interested.

My day, completely made!

Well, I confess, much as I love buying and using weird stuff, some of it does end up on eBay. Handy pocket money it is too.

So it makes my day when a buyer contacts me after a successful sale ... check this out!

Bella has planted herbs in three Twinings tea tins I sourced for her.





That makes me so happy I just have to ... put coloured pencils into a sugar bowl I bought that doesn't have a lid!

The coloured pencils were a find, too. Sigh!

A whole new thing to shrink!

Oh my goodness, crafters, I have NEWS! The plastic in the window of a business envelope is shrink plastic!












Check it out - I've stamped a nice outline flower, and shrunk, once without colouring, and once with pencil colouring. There was a third one that looked awful - not all the plastics are the same.

A tip - leave the plastic on the envelope while you stamp and colour, and cut it just before shrinking.

There you are - go to it!

Another day, another cup of pencils...

I had a trip to the local Trash and Treasure market (as usual for a Sunday morning). Some nice men were selling some household stuff, including a wooden box with a sliding lid. Good pencil box! And guess what, FULL of pencils!

So I bought it for an affordable $2.

I got home and started sorting. First I pulled out a full set of basic kids Faber Castell pencils, the kind they use at school. That's nice, we are replacing them all the time.

Then out came a full set of about 36 Derwent Artist pencils, older but all usable. Catriona nabbed them, and a tin to store them in (also a market find).

Then there was a quite big set of Conte Pastel Pencils, made in France. They are not like any pencil I've had before - a richly coloured chalk in pencil form! Wow! So they are on my desk now, stored in one of the second best teacups.

Then there were lots of usable crayons - we took a vote and decided we had plenty of our own, so they are neatly bagged up for an Op Shop.

And it's a nice box too.

Mrs Laing, how DO you keep your pencils so sharp?

Well, I have a little secret. Only I and the entire office supplies industry know about it.

It's a battery operated pencil sharpener, an X-acto Buzz, and it works really well with Prismacolor pencils - which are the main ones I've been having problems with. Those pencils are so soft, they break if the sharpener is just a tiny bit blunt.

I am sure that I'll have to keep an eye on the blade of this sharpener. When it gets blunt, I sure hope it's replaceable. It'll be worth the effort.

Yes, Prismacolor pencils fit into this sharpener, but I noticed that Derwent Artists pencils (the round barrelled ones) don't fit!

Now, I just can't remember who I bought it from. It was a vendor at Melbourne's most recent Stitches and Craft show.

Coloured Pencil Comparisons again

The first bit of colouring we have here is a classic PSX scenery stamp, coloured in Derwent Graphitint pencils - they are graphite pencils with colour. They can be used to watercolour, and the colour is brighter when you add water than you would think.

Fun to use, and you get some surprises - the sky was mostly just one shade, but it looks like several.

Horrors, there's no real yellow in this set. Hmm.

This one's still on my desk, waiting to be made up into a proper card or something.

This other card was coloured with Derwent Watercolour pencils, the regular range. Obviously I wasn't trying to make the colours match in the two samples (if I want to get properly fussy about this, that's what I'd do).

This one went to Mylene, 'cos it looks like Mill Lane! I owed her a treat, and this was the least I could do. No, really, I worked it out, it was the very least.

Let no-one else's work evade your eyes

How's this for a market find - a set of Stampin' Up stamps, featuring BIRDS, my favourite subject! It's called "Seasonal Birds" and it dates from 2002, before SU was in Australia. When I bought them they were badly mounted - the person who did them obviously hadn't been shown how to cut the stamps out properly - so I had to get them off the mounts, trim them, and stick them back on. Twenty seconds in the microwave loosens the adhesive, for your information. The mission was a complete success, and I had a new set of stamps, just to my taste.

So, what to do with them? I didn't find anything about this set in Split Coast (they have a fairly comprehensive list of all SU sets, with samples). So I had to do a wider search. I came across this lovely blog entry by Asela Hopkins of "Hop Art". No, really, go there and read it all before you finish this.

OK, you back? Isn't she good? And what a great use of the stamps!

So of course I copied. Here's a picture of me in the middle of colouring a birdy, with my reference material (her blog displayed on the iPod) at the table in front of me. I thought that made a nice photo.














After the colouring stage I tried hard to stop copying. So the layout is different now, and I've added a completely different stamp. This is a tag from "Terrific Tags Too", also from Stampin' Up. It matches quite well. Also I've just bought the SMALL tag punch, to go with the large one I already had, so I HAD to use them together.

Here's a close up birdy for you - the autumn one. Asela didn't use this stamp in her example, so I had to actually think about the autumn colours. I added the "Jasmine" pencil to the mix (it's a creamy yellow), and hardly touched the dark green.












So if you like this, go and leave Asela a friendly comment - she's feeling poorly right now, and I'm sure she'd be pleased.

And here's a final message for my far-off muse who doesn't know me at all ...

My Christmas Colours

What do you think? I have my Prismacolor pencils arranged in cups (warm colours and cool colours) and I pulled out the ones that really appealed to me. For colouring the stamp I'm using this year, that is. There was no denying it, these ones WANTED to be picked!

So I made another birdy card

Here's a card made with my NEW stamps from Pipedreamink. It's the bigger version of the pretty birdy. I didn't realise til I was stamping that the "Flying" and "Free" words were two separate words. That works for me too.

I used watercolour paper, which is so nice for tearing. You can run a coloured pencil over the torn edge and just highlight the very edge of the top surface. Makes an interesting line. These are the Prismacolor pencils again.

See the cute eyelets? Full sized, and in bright colours. That was a garage sale find - I bought a whole jar full of coloured eyelets from a woman who had just retired from making theatrical costumes. She was delighted they were going to get used; I was just delighted.

Yes, I know, the "Flying" is partly under the eyelet. I could lie, and tell you I meant to do that, but you know I was just making it up as I went along.

Just showing off, really

I recently bought a parcel of second hand stamps on eBay - some really nice ones too! Here's one, and it's a bit of a treasure. It's the PSX Botanical Hollyhock stamp, in the "K" size - that was always the biggest. We all miss PSX.

I played with it at stamp club (that's South Eastern Rubber Stampers, which I convene). One is done with Prismacolor pencils, and the other with Golden paints, and liberal use of Acrylic Glazing Liquid (which will make the little bottles go a long way!).

I finished them off at home today. I kept to the simple card format I learned ten years ago, letting the image do all the work. Then I added a scrap of dictionary page, so you'll know it's me!

I don't always get it right

I love to post pictures of artwork, just to show off how sophisticated and clever I am. But... I don't always get it right. My coloured pencil skills really let me down here, and I thought the result was too funny to just throw away! Priscilla, Queen of the Chook Pen? Perhaps taking a casual glance at some pictures of actual chickens might steer me right...

Great stamp though! It's from Sunday International.

More Prismacolor pencil fun at stamp club

I took my Prismacolor pencils to stamp club on the weekend, and made this (well, finished it at home, since I have been in the habit of forgetting to take any card stock at all to stamp club for months now). I used the colourless blender pencil, which I've praised before - it's nice, and a cheap and fun addition to the collection. The owl stamp is by Pipedreamink of Tasmania. They promise they've made some of their small designs in bigger sizes just lately, and we'll get to see them at Paperific, the big papercraft show coming up in Melbourne.

The alphabet is the "Scribble" one by Stampin' Up, known in the US as the "Doodle" alphabet. Apparently the word "doodle" is too rude for us. Or something. And the square frames are an older Stampin' Up set (I've been eBay shopping...). Sharon pointed out that the letters would fit in the frames (well spotted, that girl there), and I decided to mask them. Yay for masking!

Did you need a detail view? No, probably not, but here it is anyway.

Not a poppy

I just made this - a discussion on Stamphappy of a stamp with a poppy on it reminded me I owned this one from Tin Can Mail (and a cousin, with a lemon on an alphabet background). So I had to use it before putting it away. It's Prismacolor pencils again. I was wondering if they would overwhelm the fine lines of the stamp - yes, a bit, on the background, but the foreground holds up well. Not sure if I like it, now that I see it photographed. Oh well, try again.

How Awesome an Awesome stamp can look...

... if it's done awesomely, that is. This is the fantastic PSX Morning Glory stamp, one of the big K-sized botanicals that are so popular (and discontinued). This one's had a rubberectomy years ago (before it joined my collection) so the wording is not on the stamp. Here, it's coloured with pencils from my new HUGE Prismacolor set, including the colourless blender, which I swear by.

But here's something different - the same stamp, stamped in Raisin Adirondack dye based ink. That ink will "run" when it gets wet, and I've used it deliberately. I let the image dry a bit, then got out a fine water brush (works just as well with a fine paintbrush dipped in water) and "coloured it in" by drawing the colour from the lines into the areas I wanted coloured. Gosh that looks ... awesome!

Now, what other stamps can I do this to? There aren't that many of today's designs that lend themselves to this approach. Oops, sounding old there.

By the way, do drop me a line when the word "awesome" goes out of fashion. I'd hate to sound daggy.

Crackle Paint

Well, that last post was a bit long and serious, so here's a fun one. Where, I expect you are asking, did all painting of little plastic animals on the weekend lead to? I'm glad you asked. One of the materials I brought out was crackle medium (can you believe, I scored a whole bottle of Jo Sonja Crackle medium ALSO at the scout hall garage sale. I paid $15 for a big bag of goodies, and I've hardly started to show you everything!). The frog in an earlier post was done with crackle medium over Norwegian Orange paint (go on, start humming "Norwegian Wood" now) then highlighted with a dark brown. It looked cool, and then I made this:

It's a cardboard tile (a piece from a kids' game) painted with cream paint, then stamped (that stamp comes from Blade Rubber in London), coloured with Inktense pencils, then I painted crackle medium over it. After it dried, I highlighted the crackles with a bronzy colour. Nice, eh?

New art on the wall!

Jonathan (he's 10) had a piece of artwork sent to an exhibition organised by a local retirement community. Those canny people realise they can exhibit kids' work, charge us admission, then sell us the work too. Luckily, they do such a good job that it's a great event to go to. Here's Jonathan's echidna (done in watercolour pencils - what a chip off the old block!).

Last year, Catriona did the same thing, and we all went to the show then too. She won a "Highly Commended" for her painting. Here's her vase of flowers.

We were delighted that her friend won the biggest prize overall, for a truly great pastel drawing (which her parents stopped me from buying!).