Art Day

The last few weeks have been so busy and tiring at work, that I have had almost no time to make things. I have been thinking about making things though, and today I had almost a whole day of doing so. It was lovely! This is a teabag painting, done on a washed out, cut open and ironed teabag, with watercolour. The teabag material is strong and absorbent so the paint spreads nicely. This is a little doodle to try the technique. I have seen it on Lynne's blog recently and have had it in mind to try.

Once it was dry I dripped candle wax all over it, then ironed it on a low heat between two pieces of greaseproof paper. Beware if you do this as the wax melts quickly and spreads. I nearly had wax all over my ironing board!

Now the little painting will go in my Saffron Sea Journal. I will sew it in as glue might not work on the waxy surface. I have also seen some lovely teabag paintings at The Fairy Yellow Bug Queen blog. In fact one is in a give away this week!

Another thing I started today is making plaster surfaces to paint on. I am waiting until the summer holiday to have a go at some of the projects in Judy Wise's and Stephanie Lee's book "Plaster Studio" but adding some plaster bandage to fabric and card ready to paint on is very easy so I thought I would start that one now! I have used this plaster bandage before at school, with kids and adults-that was one of my best staff meetings-where I showed colleagues how to make junk model sculptures and cover them with it, painting later. Lots of the teachers there that year tried it with their classes and some great things were made. However, the use of this stuff is now frowned upon due to health and safety reasons-it produces lots of dust when cut( I used to advise teachers to pre-prepare the pieces outside for the kids) and also there have been a couple of incidents of burns where kids had their hands in plaster or plaster bandage as it set-and the temperature in the middle of plaster setting gets quite high. (Not in my school I hasten to add!) Anyway, all that aside, it is very easy to use!

The tinfoil is my table protection. You just dip the bandage in water and smooth it onto whatever surface you are using.

My final project today was to begin the doll of this man. Although he does not look hugely like him, he is enough like him that I am pleased! I find it really hard sculpting faces, and because I am a bit scared of it all going wrong I don't often attempt it! Not the way to get any better. However, today things went quite well. I think it was because I was working from a photo and not thinking too much about the final result, but more about how to make each bit look like the face I was looking at-like when you draw something. I find mouths the hardest, but today had a slight breakthrough. I first made the upper lip, then added a whole other section for the lower jaw, which gave him a slightly more realistic look-and profile. The pictures I took were blurry but I will show you soon. He has now been baked and has a cone fabric body. I wanted him to stand up and this was my solution for the day! I watched the video in the link below about how to tie a turban. I am going to try to do it realistically.

This is the video.