Salad Days

This is a bowlful of my last remaining salad leaves from the garden. We've been eating home-grown salad for about three months now and there is something deeply satisfying about walking outside with a salad bowl and picking the leaves straight into it. We're totally organic so don't have to wash the leaves - just straight from garden to mouth!

I still have tomatoes growing - they've been much better this year as it's been such a dry year. I don't have a greenhouse so they have to be outside and in past years they've got so wet that they've begun rotting on the vine before ripening and I've had to rush out and rescue them in their under-ripe state. Great for green tomato chutney but no good in a salad. There are some plants (the ones with the bigger variety of fruit) that don't seem to be getting past the green stage still, so there may well be a chutney making session looming.

The leaves in the bowl include 'Cocarde', 'Lollo Biondi' and 'Red Salad Bowl'. There is also some wild Rocket in there and I'm still picking this despite the fact that it's flowered.

Huge Mushrooms

I found these mushrooms in the fields where I walk Misty every morning. There were two pairs, one of which had been dug up by an animal but this pair was still intact. I had to wait until later in the day to go back with my camera to photograph them and luckily nothing had dug them up in the meantime.

They were absolutely huge (my use of the past tense confirms that they have since been destroyed and have rotted) - I've seen nothing like them before. They must have stood 8 inches high and their caps were as much across. I have no idea whether they would be edible and I don't think I'd be interested in finding out!

I sketched them from one of my photos and watercoloured them and then spent hours trying to find an appropriate verse to add. Have you any idea how few quotations there are containing 'mushroom'?

Zuni Fetishes

These are mountain lion and bear, my Zuni fetishes. And believe me, they're not bright orange and yellow really! I love them and really want to add wolf but haven't been able to find one yet.

This was a classic case of fiddling. I started out on a blank page and decided, instead of using pen and ink and then painting, I'd draw the little sculptures in watercolour pencils and have no outline. Well, that didn't work because I still had an outline which I couldn't get rid of even after using water over the pencils. And they also looked really dull colour-wise! That's fine in the flesh but no good for a drawing I decided. So I went over the watercolour pencil with some liquid watercolours I have. That's where the bright got in there! Then I thought I'd outline them with pen & ink. Then I decided they needed shadows which ended up looking a little clunky. And then (!!) I recalled reading in a book on art journals about making a background on a page by sponging acrylic paint through plastic tapestry canvas. SO I DID THAT TOO!

There can't be many people who put in the background after the foreground surely? Anyway, I left it on my desk for a while and visited it every now and then to have another look and then I decided, to hell with it - I'll post it. It's been too many days since I had something to post and I've been feeling a little out of sorts about that.

So here it is folks. Another PC mess! Or maybe I'll call it 'quirky' which is probably the same thing.

PS. As I'm writing this I'm listening to the most fabulous operatic compilation CD - truly inspiring.

Fly Like the Wind

I was looking through some old pads of paintings and sketches and such like the other day and I found some of my practice pieces for a calligraphy course I did with a couple of friends some years ago.

I remember really enjoying the course and doing quite a bit of lettering afterwards. I made 'Thank You' cards and birthday cards and one Christmas I made all my Christmas cards.

So I thought I'd see if I could remember some of it. I found all my old dip pens (I must have about every size anyone ever made!) I did this trial in my new journal book, but I prefer how the lettering looks on rough watercolour paper so will try something else. It doesn't really work over two pages of my journal either and my scanner doesn't seem to be the best in the world but I'm sure I can overcome all of that.

Half the fun of calligraphy is finding a quotation that lends itself to being presented in a visual way - it's also the challenge! Looking at work that professional calligraphers have produced is both inspirational and depressing, but I think I'm over worrying about that. EDM group has helped a lot to give me confidence to post some of my trials!

First day of Journaling

I started a new sketchbook which I'm going to try and keep for journaling as opposed to just sketching (with a few comments!). I've begun to read Gwen Diehn's book, The Decorated Page, and decided to try and work through it.

This is my first attempt and is based around some ears of wheat I collected on my walk with Misty yesterday. I'm a little unsure of exactly what a journal is supposed to include, but think it's probably just anything and everything that grabs my mind or reflects my day. Whether I'll be able to keep this up every day is very doubtful, but a few times a week would be good. And especially those days which have a real impact on me for some reason - sad days, or happy days or just grrrrr days (like today has been so far!).

This entry was drawn in pen & ink and coloured with acrylic inks. The journal is a Fabriano one with really heavyweight watercolour pages and a snazzy red and white patterned cover. Very yummy and it took a lot of courage to make the first mark!

Still working on the 'backgrounds'. So far lots of mess plus one rather nice one that I have no idea what to do with!

I also did a quick sketch for one of the EDM subjects. Pen and ink and watercolour this time and in the old sketch book.

My first figure drawing

This is my first ever figure drawing. I copied her from a photograph in a magazine. I can list a whole lot of things that are wrong with it but I'm not going to because it's my first and I'm not unhappy with it. If I really was unhappy I wouldn't post it!

I need lots of practice before I'll have the guts to try a living, breathing person I think because the trouble with people is they move! I need them to be absolutely static for now to give me time for all that erasing and re-doing. I did it in pencil first until I thought it looked OK and then I drew it in ink and put in a little watercolour. For some reason the scan seems to have put some dirty marks on it - I think this may be a shadow of what's painted on the other side of the page. Note to self - don't paint on the back of other paintings or the scanner will pick it up.

I'm still working on the background applied with a roller - I did a page yesterday and was really pleased with it. It had lots of texture from the roller as well as colour. I just applied small blobs of Viridian and White to the page and rollered over it. I had to put a little more white on top of the darker green because it was too dark but the overall effect was just what I wanted. I should have posted a picture of it as the first stage of a journal page, but I drew some letters on top of the background and painted them in acrylic ink, the idea being to decorate them on top of the ink. But two things went wrong - I picked complementary colours for the letters and it didn't work, particularly because the background colours showed through and made the letters look really muddy. And acrylic ink has a sheen to it which didn't look very nice.

So I've treated it as a learning experience and will do another background and go from there. I'm wondering whether the acrylic has enough texture in it to mark some patterns into it before the paint dries. I'll experiment and see...

Baubles and Beads

This is my necklace tree. Actually, it's a mug tree but I use it for my necklaces.

To be honest with you it's not really red - it's cream. I painted it cream originally and then put in the messy background and the tree looked a bit overwhelmed, so I changed the colour to red. That was a disaster so I frantically wetted the paint and blotted it out so now it's a rather horrendous looking mixture.

I think this is a good lesson for me to know when to stop fiddling.

I put in the date at the top with my new Lamy Joy calligraphy pen. It has three sizes of nibs - 11, 1.5 and 1.9 and this is the latter. I ordered a converter with it so I could use any ink in it rather than just cartridges and I filled it with Noodler's grey which is supposed to be one of their bleed-proof inks but isn't really.

I'm thinking of experimenting with lettering a bit. I've seen a few people doing this and it can be great fun. But first I'm going to have a go at putting a background onto paper using acrylic paint and a brayer (aka a lino roller). I watched an interesting YouTube video recently which showed techniques such as winding rubber bands or bubble wrap or anything with texture around the roller. It looked fun! And messy ...