Snoskred - Life in the Country

Jut a quick update on the Denkyem painting.  I have now painted over the top of it with the base color which is going to be red - I will start painting the textured areas black soon.

The red is a combination of three shades of red, two of them metallic.

So, with art, there are times when you can make *huge* mistakes, and yet still fix them with a bit of creativity. And this project is one of those.

A long while back - before we moved here over a year ago - I started a project by painting a canvas pale green. I was intending to stick sequins to it and maybe make a butterfly out of it. Then we were moving, so I packed the canvas away. It was the first thing that jumped out at me when I opened the art box.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it now, but I still had sequins and I also had the stencil from this art project which I gave to my nephew for Christmas a long time ago. And what an absolutely kick butt painting that turned out to be (no, we didn’t add more dots, I just sealed it as you see it there in that post).

So I thought I would try sticking sequins to the Denkyem stencil shape. Unfortunately, glue and sequins do not seem to mix and they turned out not shiny. Oh NOES! What to do?

Use modelling paste to build up the canvas, and then paint over it in black, I think. And then dry brush in some silver or gold over the top.

As you can see I am in the middle of this project, I may layer it up a bit more yet. Because you can still the the sequins at the moment.

It’s been a hellish couple of days for me and I need to seek refuge in the Art. Peace Out!

When we lived back in Adelaide some years ago, we bought a couple of ex-office tables from Mr Bankrupt. The tables were $29 each but they would have been worth a lot more originally. They were old and the tops were not perfect but they were solid. The bottoms of the tables were even more solid than the tops.

I’ve been using them for art tables for some time now just with some old material on top of them but when I decided to get serious about art again I wanted to cover at least one of them properly. So when we went shopping the other day I chose some pink cotton which is almost as tough as canvas itself.

Yesterday, The Other Half got out the staplegun and stapled first a layer of table cover material, then the pink stuff. And here is how it looked once he was done.

Yep, it is really pink! And here is how it looks 24 hours later, with quite a few art projects already taking up space. I’ll tell you more about each project in the coming days.

I put down some newspaper and then a clean layer of a4 paper because I never am too sure about newspaper and whether the ink will transfer to something else. However this is not just a4 paper out of a fresh packet, all this has been used, either written on or printed on the other side. This is recycling, and of course once I am done with it all the paper will end up in the recycling bin.

I’ll show you the other table, which resides on the other side of my desk, once I have made it more presentable. At the moment it has a lot of stuff on it.

I’m playing with texture on a few of these projects, using modelling paste to create some different things. That is the big jar you can see on the table there. This is actually the last thing I was doing in the art class I was going to a while back so it kinda feels like a complete circle. I am also doing some stencilling.

I keep my paints on the other table, they are still inside a big container to keep them all neat. I mix up over that side, then once I have it how I want it, I move back to the pink table and paint.

I currently have 7 different works in progress there. I like to do a few at a time because you never know what you’re going to feel like working on that day.

Yay! I have begun to add the sequins to the Christmas Balls. For the first one, I have chosen a color scheme of Gold and Blue. The gold sequins have a kind of holographic or opalescent effect on them, as you can see from the photos.

The blue is a fair bit lighter than it appears in the photos. The flash seems to darken the color a bit.  You can see how the gold has elements of greens, blues, reds and pinks due to the holographic effect. Here is another shot from a bit of a distance.

So now it is just a matter of adding more sequins until I’m done. These will not be perfect, but that is part of the point. I think I will give this to one of my nephews.