Watercolour: The Shadow Waltz

I've had such a lot of work on lately that I haven't had time (or the energy) to do anything else, but last night I sent off a completed project, and as my day hadn't been all that fabulous, I decided that I could allow myself a little time to splash around with my watercolours. 

So, Ruby Keeler, from a screenshot of the beautiful Busby-Berkeley-choreographed "Shadow Waltz" from Gold-diggers of 1933. That's one of my favourite 30s musicals, and one of my favourite Berkeley numbers. 

 I used five colours only for this: my favourite Paynes Grey, Neutral Tint, Permanent Mauve, Rose Dore and Permanent Carmine. 

I also used masking fluid, although it and I never get on particularly well....

Winsor & Newton watercolours and masking fluid on mysterious un-branded watercolour paper. I used a straw to shove the paint around a bit and a tiny bit of white acrylic for a couple of touch-ups. 

1.5 hours. 

Activity: Chinese New Year Paper Lanterns

A little late (I've been busy) but here's a quick art activity I threw together as a back-up plan for my friend, who's currently doing relief teaching in primary schools. 

So here we have paper lanterns with snakes – obviously open to lots more decoration, this example was put together in under 10 minutes! – and designed to be easy enough for six year olds with the minimum of messy art supplies to stress out a relief teacher. The theme is (I hope obviously) the Chinese Year of the Snake:

Here's a step-by-step animated gif:

1. 

Print out the lantern template (provided at the bottom of the post) onto coloured paper. Alternatively you could measure the sections yourself. (I'm using A4 paper, and I cut a 2.5cm strip off the long side for use as a handle, folded the remaining paper in half lengthwise, and cut strips over the fold, at 1.5cm intervals, stopping 2.5cm from the edge.)

At this point the lantern can be decorated with paints or textas. 

Fold the paper in half along the dotted line. 

2. 

Cut along the lines, starting at the fold.

3. 

When you unfold the paper, you can roll it up and glue it to form a lantern.

4. 

Add the handle at the top.

5. 

Draw a long wiggly snake on some coloured paper, and decorate it. 

6. 

Cut out your snake.

7. 

Add some dots of glue at intervals along the back of the snake. It's important not to put glue everywhere, as when the snake is attached to the lantern, you want to glue it down with the glued bits closer together than they really are, so the spaces in-between loop up and look more lively.

8. 

Attach the snake to the lantern, and make more snakes to attach.

Lantern Template

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Sneak Peek: Portraits

I've got two portraiture commissions on my desk at the moment, and have been dividing my time between them and a project on the computer. Here's a look:

Almost everything you see here is using a 0.5 mechanical pencil with a #B lead. I'll be using some #8B later, but haven't yet. For more information on the tools I use for portraiture, check out my tutorial.

Activity: Fireworks Over Perth

I put together an art project as a test for my mother to use in her class, based on something I vaguely remember doing myself in year 2. That was (horrors!) nearly 20 years ago, so I improvised quite a lot. =P

I set my camera up and was filming it so I could get process screenshots, but it turned itself off half way through (for no apparent reason, full battery, empty SD card....) which I, seated in front of it, didn't notice. So I'm afraid the process shots stop abruptly halfway through. 

This is the final product, using wax resist and collage, with embellishments and an exploration of mirroring. It's intended to be the Skyworks Fireworks over Perth and the Swan River on Australia Day, but it can be any city.

You Will Need:

Thick paper

Black paper/card

Crayons or oil pastels

Paint and brushes

Scissors, pencil & ruler

Glitter pens

Step 1:

Find the midline in a piece of sturdy paper. I'm using 300gsm watercolour paper here; the thinner the paper, the more it will buckle when wet.

Step 2:

Using a white crayon or oil pastel, draw some fireworks in the top half of the paper. Press nice and hard so lots of wax gets on the paper.

Step 3:

Now use coloured crayons/oil pastels and draw the same fireworks in colour. Try and put the coloured lines between the white lines, but it doesn't matter if they overlap a bit. 

Step 4:

Now draw the coloured fireworks upside down on the bottom half of the paper. These are the reflections, so you draw each firework directly below the 'main' firework, upside down. Check where each firework is in relation to the middle line, and if it's close, you draw the reflection close, and if it's far away, you draw it far away.

Step 5: 

Now use a waterbased paint (I'm using Ecoline ink, but watercolour, edicol dye, poster paint and watered-down acrylic will work just as well.) and paint a dark blue over all of the paper. The wax will resist the paint and you will see your fireworks.

Step 5: 

Put the wet paper aside to dry, and get a piece of black paper or cardboard the same width as the painted paper. Fold it in half.

It was at this point that my camera died, so you'll have to bear with me.

With the black paper still folded, draw the outline of a cityscape on one side. Make sure you don't draw all the way down to the fold, keep some short buildings so that the city stays in one piece when you cut it out. 

Step 6:

With the paper still folded, cut out the city around your lines. When you are finished, unfold the paper and you will have two cities, mirror images of each other, joined together like paper dolls. 

Step 7:

Use a yellow oil pastel (or some poster paint, acrylic, whatever) to draw some yellow windows onto your city

Step 8:

Now for the tricky part. The upside-down city is the reflection in the river, so chop it up a bit. Glue the intact city onto the paper so that the fold line is on top of the middle line on your painting, and then put the reflection back together. It doesn't have to be perfect, and make sure you leave spaces between the pieces, so it looks like the reflection is broken up by the water. 

Step 10:

Lastly, add some glitter to the fireworks in the sky. I used a glue pen and loose glitter, but glue pens would be just as good, and much less messy – I just didn't have any to hand. With the three layers to the fireworks (white, colour and glitter) you get a more three dimensional effect.

And you're done! 

If you use these instructions, or have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. =)

Other activity posts:

Haunted House Painting

Screaming Bookmarks

Jacaranda Seed Christmas Decorations

Or click the 'activities' tag to your right =)

Design: 21st Birthday Invitations

I've just finished some birthday invitations for a 21st birthday. I was asked for fractals in blue, green and purple – but since I don't have a clue how to use fractal programmes, I simulated the effect with a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. Fortunately, seahorse tail fractals were the type of choice anyway!

I created the shape to be used for the fractals in Illustrator, then took it into Photoshop, duplicated, resized and slightly rotated it, and then repeated that command until I had a swirl. It took me a few goes to get a swirl I was happy with, duplicated it a few times, and I ended up with this:

Naturally I couldn't leave it looking like that, so I added some spirograph-type designs (created in Illustrator) and some glowy bits, until I had something much more atmospheric. I added the text in inDesign, using Takion for the font; the birthday boy loves science and mathematics, and I felt that font fitted that theme nicely.

The majority of the invitations were emailed out, but for those that were to be posted, I got 5x7" prints done at a Kodak Photobooth. This meant some of the border was chopped off, but they still came out very nicely. 

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign CS6

Sketch: Southern Belle

Here's a sketch I worked on, on and off, for a week. When I started it I had been intending to sketch something far more adventurous, but I was feeling very stressed and extremely disillusioned with people in general... and so fell back on my default of pretty girls in pretty dresses instead. I could overhear a western my father was watching in another room, involving a pretty girl from the South, so I went with a saintly Southern Belle with magnolia in her hair.

Working on all those frills and curls was very therapeutic. =) It's across 2 pages of an A5 Moleskine sketchbook. 

And the other day I slapped some colour on in Photoshop CS6, as a warm-up for some digital work. I quite like the way the dress came out, but I'm not too enamoured of the rest of it... the colouring took about 40 minutes. 

Orders of Service

My Great Aunt died (at the grand age of almost 94) on the 12th, plunging us into frantic funeral planning. She was in a lot of pain, and we were very sorry to see her go, but some people didn't seem to appreciate her qualities as maybe they should (she had her faults, but don't we all?) so I wanted to make sure she had a nice Order of Service to send her off in style. She actually had two services (a funeral and a memorial service) but we used the same cover for both, only changing the information inside.

Previously I have done photo collages of important items for orders of service, but as all such important items were in Moora about 100 miles away, this was out of the question. Also, as we were not going to a professional printer, I couldn't arrange for printing right to the edge of the cover, which would have spoiled the effect somewhat. 

Aunty Phyl loved flowers of all kinds, so I went to the Victorian Language of Flowers for inspiration, as no one could really tell me a specific favourite flower, and made a border for use on the booklets:

This contains the following:

Michaelmas Daisies – farewell

Harebells – grief

Green Locust Tree – affection beyond the grave

Osmunda – dreams

Persimmon – "bury me among nature's beauties"

Red Poppy – consolation

White Poppy – sleep, my antidote 

Weeping Willow – mourning 

I did a very rough version in Photoshop to start with, so I could work out roughly where everything should go, then a clean sketch on paper, which I inked and coloured digitally in Adobe Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3. I was inspired by Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers, and added a faint halftone pattern to the whole thing to subtly suggest older printing methods and add a bit of texture:

Once the border was done I inserted photographs into it. A large, fairy recent (taken at her 90th birthday, but I didn't have access to anything taken more recently) photo for the front, and a smaller photo from the 1930s for the back. The font is Melany Lane. 

I added some swirls (from the Melany Lane Ornaments font) to fill up empty space on the front. We got them printed at Officeworks, but unfortunately not all of the swirls ended up printing and those that did were much more subtle (although not quite as subtle as appears from this photo =P)

I also did the interior of the booklet, using Adobe Indesign CS6. The inside cover contained a dot-point timeline of her life, and we managed to fit the whole order of service onto the front and back of an A4 page (so four booklet pages) and even had some room left over for a little decoration. For this purpose I did a linework hyacinth ('constancy', but also a flower she was very fond of):

I coloured this digitally for use on the Thank You cards:

I printed these (two per A4 page) myself, and used a punch to get the round corners.