WOYWW 381

Better late than never! 10.00 p.m. still qualifies to show What’s On My Workdesk Wednesday!

I’ve finally managed to find some studio time today, and began working on some Zentangle tracings for the mini-album I’m making about our recent walk in the woods with our friends.

This week you can see the far side of my studio, which is my drawing area. The shelves above on the far right are where I store all my pens and other drawing stuff, and my Zentangle album, which is on the left on the picture so that I can pull the cards out, for the designs I want for this project.

The book is resting on the pull-out unit that usually lives under the drawing area, but I pulled it out today so that I could sit there more comfortably.

You can see that I am working on my light panel, which makes tracing a doddle. For years I held off buying a light box and I’m glad I did – this is so much better – a flat panel illuminated by LEDs, a lot more comfortable and more natural to draw on, and it also doesn’t get as hot as a regular light box. I work on a translucent cutting mat which is laid on top – this cuts out the light a bit, which is more comfortable on the yes, and gives a slightly softer surface to work on, too.

Beside the light panel you can see some of the photos I printed out for this project. I am going to do several Zentangle tracings over these photos, working with my regular Zentangle pens on parchment paper, and these pages will be bound on top of their respective photos in the album.

Here are some detail shots.

Sorting the photos a few weeks ago after I’d printed them out.

Here is the beginning of the tracing. The photo I’m working on at the moment is one that I manipulated – it’s quite an edgy black-and-white posterised picture – I thought this treatment suited the rather stark view of the isolated tree trunks.

Completing the tracing.

The tracing completed.

Here is the tracing peeled back to reveal the photo underneath.

Hopefully I’ll get some more time over the coming weeks to spend in the studio working on this project.

Health Update

I had my CT scan a fortnight ago and have been trying to chase up the results and of course no-one will tell me anything over the phone. It appears that it was my surgeon, and not the oncologist, who ordered it, and I had a letter a couple of days ago, with an appointment to see him in mid-October – this put me into a bit of a flat spin for a day, as I started to think the worst – if it was OK, surely they would have written to tell me? I was in touch with several friends from the cancer support centre and a couple of them immediately rallied round, emailing me to reassure me that this is the normal way they do things, and if it was bad news, they would have scheduled an earlier appointment than mid-Oct. I love it that we all support each other! I have had very few wobbles throughout my cancer journey but this did throw me a bit – which only goes to prove how unpredictable one’s emotions can be. I have been so strong throughout and it shook me a bit to be thrown so off balance by this! After these emails, though, I was immediately back on track again and feeling fine about everything.

I have been overdoing things lately, and this past week I have had three bad days with my ME which isn’t too clever… However, I did manage to do some baking the other day, in time for our first informal get-together for friends at the cancer support centre – several of us from the relaxation group and also the Moving On After Cancer course have become friends. We had the biggest laugh ever, last Friday at our first informal meeting! I can’t believe how many lovely people I have met, and new friends I have made, through having cancer!

Other News

My Bible study group has now been running for two weeks, and although the numbers have started off small, several people are expecting to attend in coming weeks – they have prior commitments at present – and I’ve got the material uploaded to my Dropbox for group members to download, including recordings of the sessions, so nobody needs to miss anything! I am thrilled with how technology has moved on since I last did this over ten years ago. I have spent a lot of time over recent weeks, updating my old material and redoing visual aids etc. so that they can now be viewed on the TV screen – the TV is connected to the laptop. Amazing when you think that when I did this before, I was using acetates on an OHP!

The biggest question of the moment is, “What on earth am I going to do with myself now the Paralympics are over?”!! I feel quite bereft! I have enjoyed it so much, and the Olympics beforehand… Definitely more studio time, I think!!

WOYWW 379

Nothing very different on my desk this week but I thought I’d join in and catch you up with bits of news!

On the right you can see the small mixed media piece I started a while back (no further progress there) and in the middle, the printed photos of our Mamhead Woods outing ready for work on my album (no further progress there either). In the small black bowl in front of the jar of brushes are some of my mask-and-spray flowers and leaves ready for that project.

On the left, in the large black bowl, you can see three of the tissue paper collage boxes I’ve been working on recently. You can read all about them here. These were under wraps with some other work, which was all part of my friend’s 60th birthday stuff which I didn’t want her to see on my blog. I gave it to her on Friday so I’m now able to remove the wraps.

The fourth box was the one I completed for her present, and you can read about it here. Here’s a picture of the finished box.

It is lined with my faux mother of pearl that I shared recently, and there’s a single pearl stuck inside. You can’t see the sides of the box properly on this photo – this is what they are like:

Done with transparent 3-D gel medium, glass microbeads and pearlescent acrylic inks.

I made her a 3-D floating butterflies card – which was why I was cutting out so many butterflies recently! I’ve done two blog posts about that, here and here.

Here are a couple of photos of the finished card.

Quite hard to get the colour just right – it’s actually more orange and less pink than this!

Health Update

On Saturday night I was cutting a piece of very hard ginger with one of my large kitchen knives and the knife slipped and I cut my finger very deeply, necessitating a visit to A&E. It bled a LOT. I couldn’t bear to look at it!! They strapped it up for me and that first evening I had to keep my arm in a high sling to prevent further bleeding. I went back a couple of days ago and they changed the dressing and checked on its progress – no sign of infection but too soon for the steri-strips to be removed. I have to return on Friday and hopefully they’ll take them off then, and maybe give me a smaller dressing. It’s more inconvenient than anything else and hasn’t been too painful – except for about half an hour ago when I inadvertently caught it on something just in the wrong place! Ouuuuccchhh!!!

I had a CT scan yesterday to check that I am still cancer-free. I have to phone through in about a week to see if there’s a result. I am not worried – I am sure they got all the cancer out with the surgery, and the subsequent chemo will have mopped up anything else, but if they do find something, then we’ll just have to deal with it as and when. Got to keep positive!

Other Stuff

I’ve been feeling so much better this year that I have been picking up many threads of my old (and even pre-M.E.) life – my baking, singing, guitar playing… and I’ve been feeling very strongly this year that it’s time to re-start a Bible study group in our home. For the past few weeks I’ve been working hard on revamping my old material (I have a lot – I taught groups for many years where we used to live) and adapting it to modern technology. I have re-designed the group logo and this shows how much the technology has moved on, as well as my ability to use it:

Multiple photo-realistic images with transparent backgrounds, re-sized, layered, addition of shadow layers, etc. etc. Who needs clipart these days? I’m pleased with the result.

I’ve finally got all my computers taking to one another in a friendly fashion on the home network! I’m now able to use PowerPoint for my visual aids and words of songs, and I’ve got the Windows laptop communicating with the TV to display the visual aids, and using GarageBand on the MacBook for voice recording for the sessions. I even have a foot mouse to control the PowerPoint pages so I can be hands-free while playing the guitar. I shan’t be playing for this first session though, with my finger all strapped up!

Nature

Nicholas brought home an orphaned baby squirrel last week, which we had to find a more suitable home for asap – we had it for about 24 hours and probably saved its life, feeding it milk from a syringe.

Beautiful cobwebs in our garden this morning, revealed in all their glory with tiny water droplets from the mist.

More pictures here.

I think you can see why I haven’t had much time for art.

Sea-Themed Altered Box

Another of several posts for today!

This is the first of four boxes that I have completed, from my tissue paper collage boxes project. You can read about the beginning of this project here. I began with the blue-green one, which was to have a seaside theme, as a gift for a friend celebrating a significant birthday.

This was the development of a similar box I altered back in May 2012. Here it is for comparison.

The first step was to add some waves to the sides of the box, and I did this by applying a fairly thick layer of Finnabair 3D transparent matte gel medium all around, with a palette knife, and I then went around again with the palette knife, “sculpting” the wave shapes.

I then sprinkled on some glass micro-beads over a bowl to catch the excess, which I then poured back into the jar. A lot of them fell off over the next hour or so and it remained to be seen how many would still be stuck on after the gel medium had dried!

As soon as the gel medium had formed a skin on the surface, I applied some coarse pumice gel medium to the lid, leaving a space for what would be a small rock pool, and sculpting some of it to resemble sand over which the waves had left an impression.

I had to leave the box overnight at this stage as the gel mediums needed to be thoroughly dry before applying any paint or embellishments.

In the meantime, I turned to the embellishments. I got out my jar of small air-dry clay pebbles which I made some time ago for my stash, and a selection of natural coloured fluid acrylic paints.

I painted a base coat of cream over the entire surface of each of the selected pebbles, and then applied some of the beige and a little of the white, in what I hope is a realistic representation of pebbles you find on the beach. Turning each pebble around in my fingers in order to paint the entire surface was quite good because my fingers tended to smudge and blend the paint somewhat, giving a more natural appearance.

The final task that evening was to make the starfish. I had a silicone mould that I’d made from a starfish charm – you can see that it had a ring on the top, but this can be cut off the finished piece. I made it from Fimo air-dry clay (the same as the pebbles) and popped it out of the mould and left it to dry overnight.

The next day, when it is dry, I was able to trim off the ring and the excess clay around the edges.

Here is the side of the box now that the transparent gel medium has dried. I have put a moulded clay face underneath it to tip it up a bit so you can see it better.

I felt that there wasn’t enough contrast, so I added some of the gorgeous Daler Rowney pearlescent acrylic inks, brushing them on and dabbing it with kitchen paper and repeating the process until I got the desired result. These liquid acrylics really shimmer!

The glass microbeads were still falling off, so I decided the only thing for it was to add some soft gloss gel medium to keep them stuck on.

Here is the box once the gel medium had dried. The glass microbeads were nice and firmly stuck now.

Moving on to the lid, I filled the “rock pool” with Glossy Accents.

I then moved on to the inside of the box. I have given this a lot of thought and wondered what I could do that would echo the sea theme but also be a contrast. Years ago I went on an embroidery course where we learnt box making and the teacher said that every box should contain a surprise. I love this idea!

After a good night’s sleep, I decided that in this case, the box should be like the inside of a shell, lined with nacre (mother of pearl). I did a search online for a technique to create faux mother of pearl, and did some experiments. I have done a separate blog post about this here.

All the boxes were prepared in advance by painting a coat of gesso inside and out, and now I went over this with titanium white acrylic paint on the inside of the box and lid to give a smooth white surface.

The first step in creating the mother of pearl effect was to dab on some distress ink in Spun Sugar and Broken China, using a screwed up piece of cling film.

I repeated the process, this time using Liquid Pearls.

After this I applied a layer of Finnabair 3D transparent matt gel medium, using the smallest palette knife I have got, which reaches into the bottom of the box. After applying it fairly roughly, I went over it with a large flat brush, slightly moistened, to smooth out the roughness, and I used curving brush strokes to resemble the inside of a shell. Unfortunately this doesn’t show up very well on the photo.

I couldn’t do any more on the inside until this gel medium was dry, so I got out my Daler Rowney pearlescent acrylic inks again, and painted them on around the rim of the box. With these boxes there is always the danger of applying too much paint, which means that the lids won’t go on, but this stuff is so thin that I thought it would be OK. In the photo, you can see the edge of the tissue paper collage, which shows how thick this is, and how if it went to the top of the box, the lid definitely wouldn’t have gone on.

Also while waiting for the inside to dry, I decided to paint the sand on the top of the lid. I mixed together several of my Pebeo fluid acrylic paints till I got the right sand colour, and painted the coarse pumice gel medium which I’d sculpted into a rough sandy shape, and which had dried nice and hard. I carefully avoided the rock pool in the centre, but any stray paint wiped straight off the shiny surface of the Glossy Accents.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the painted sand.

For this photo, I propped the lid up on one side so that you can see how thick the sand is, and also the wave pattern on the side of the lid, done with the Daler Rowney acrylic inks, gel medium and glass microbeads.

I thought that for the surprise inside the box, I’d put a single pearl, as in an oyster. Going through my stash, in my “Junk Jewellery” box I found this necklace. Whenever I go to village fetes I pick up loads of junk jewellery – some of it is actually quite nice and I wear it, but there’s a lot of pretty awful stuff, but if you can look beyond that and see instead the elements that make it up, there’s often some quite useable stuff. I chose one of the large pearls from this necklace and removed it by straightening the wire which was threaded through it, and put it in the bowl of embellishments for the box.

I returned later, once the gel medium on the inside of the box had dried. However, I wasn’t quite happy with the 3D matte medium, even though this was my first choice of the experimental samples I’d done. Inside the box, I felt it needed a bit more sheen, so I added a coat of Finnabair heavy body gloss medium.

Here is the completed mother of pearl lining to the box. In real life, the colour shows up a bit more, and it’s more lustrous.

Painting the starfish. I used my Pebeo fluid acrylics for this.

Assembling the embellishments on the box lid, and about to make the seaweed from thin strips of green tissue paper torn from scraps. I stuck the embellishments to the lid of the box with Pinflair glue, and made the seaweed and stuck it down with soft gloss gel medium.

The single pearl inside the mother of pearl lined box, stuck down with Pinflair glue.

Finally, some photos of the completed box, once the gel medium on the seaweed was dry.

The box opened, revealing the mother of pearl lining and the little pearl.

I gave my friend this little box on Friday, and I am happy to say she was delighted with it.