A birthday Card

I am terrible at making cards, really,really terrible.. not the actually making so much as the remembering to make and then remembering to send. It is a rare thing indeed to get a homemade card from me lol However, My brother is a huge Batman fan, so I just had to make a card for him.

I previous years I have done silhouettes of the batman character, but this time i wanted to try a different character and more of a realistic sketch. 

I started out with sketching the general shapes. 

and then blocked in the darkest areas..

Working on one area at a time...

I wasn't sure at all that I ha captured the features well, I wasn't well and was sketching this in bed. It looked more like Einstein than the Joker lol

I knew I wanted to work in graphite, but I also wanted a splash of colour. Using Crayola Slick Stix I added the bright red scar across the mouth. 

Here it is taken in better light, it is also laid on my ipad cover. I think it would look cool in a red frame. 

Darcy x

Tiny Teabag Sketches

As I had amassed a bagful of tea bags, I decided to do some tiny animal sketches. They are so quick and easy to do. All I used were Derwent charcoal pencils and a little gesso. 

Charcoal is very smudgey and as such very forgiving, you don't need to be very neat or accurate.. 

I mounted each onto a piece of neutral/beige card. 

and wrote the sentiment on a piece of old book page..( I use the centre text of pages for collage but I keep the plain margins from book pages to write sentiments or stamp text.. )

I used a fountain pen for this but you could stamp your text. 

Then I mounted each animal and sentiment onto a card blank, 

They really don't need anything else, I guess this is my way of doing CAS, something I find impossible in paint. 

I really like them, they are sweet, and with a simple 'hello' greeting they can be used for any occasion. 

Darcy 

Anyone for Tea?

Once you have made your tea, empty and rinse your tea bag and art on them...Sounds crazy doesn't it. I have been saving tea bags for ages.. ok so that does make me sound crazy, but I have wanted to make some mini art for a long time..just never had the time. then a gorgeous lady called Lyn Tivenan started showing her tea bag art on FB and it reminded me that I had a bagful waiting to be used. 

If you search pinterest there are lots of examples of tea bag art. 

First I selected some tea bags of various shades and tried to die cut them, to my surprise it worked. These dies are all by Seth Apter. 

I started with a circle, added some gesso and created this little portrait with Derwent charcoal pencils. 

I then painted some of the other cuts with Bora Bora and South Pacific. 

I took some more tea bags and added a little paint to them. Chocolate Pudding, Toffee, Caramel, Nougat. I added it with just a finger as the teabags are very fragile. 

The letters were painted with Coral 

I added some stamping to the background bags with the French text stamp and archival ink. the FLY text was glued on and then outlined. 

I added a tiny little colour to the face using Derwent XL charcoal. 

It was fiddly trying to glue it all down as the teabag die cuts were very flimsy. 

Everything was mounted to a white card blank. I am very happy with how it turned out. 

Darcy x

Ballerina

When I was a kid I danced.. not just randomly, I had lessons. In fact I was made to go 4 times a week and I hated it. I took lessons from being 3yrs old to about 12yrs old. I was so glad to stop. I did all my grades, in ballroom, latin, modern sequence and disco and took part in competitions, I wore stupid frilly dresses with net underskirts and I had ringlets in my hair and I hated all of it. it was never my choice, and after I stopped I never danced again until I was about 40. A friend talked me into trying tap dancing, something I had never done before and it was exhausting but good fun. for the first time in my life I was actually enjoying dancing. Maybe that was more to do with getting new shoes!

Now ballet is something I have never done, I have an idealistic view of it, that I would be graceful and beautiful ... that I would somehow lose 60lbs by putting on the shoes and would grow 6 inches taller. Of course the reality is I would look like a fairy elephant! 

But the shoes... I want the shoes... and not just because I love shoes. 

Ballet shoes have something magical about them..something nostalgic and ethereal. 

So i made a ballet page. 

I started with PaperArtsy Infusions, I painted the page first with Satin Glaze, sprinkled on the infusions and then lightly dragged more glaze to seal them. 

Next I sketched my shoes. 

I then painted them, sorry no progress shots. I used Prima watercolours and just built up the layers using pinks, grey, brown and white. 

On either side of the shoes I added more Infusions this time in blue. I allowed them to soak a little so that the walnut started to show through then I dried them. 

In parts they were  a little dark, so I flicked on some clean water and then dabbed this off to remove some colour. 

I added shading to the shoes using Derwent XL charcoal 

Added some flicks of white paint. 

and a border using black Crayola slickstix.

Finally I wanted to add some text. Initially I wanted to use the text from the Everything Art stamp {#3} but the stamps were too small for what I wanted. So I used a white pen to write the same text out, adding more words of my own. 

I am really pleased with this page, it is as close as I will ever get to ballet lol. 

what did you always want to do but never could? why don't you create a page about it. 

Darcy x

Shakespeare in Colour

So I have had this chunky book of the works of Shakespeare for a while now, it was only 20p at a car boot sale. the cover is shiny and plasticky and not appealing at all…

but the insides… oh swoon, be still my beating heart. The pages are super thin, beautifully delicate and not too ‘new’ looking , though this book is only about 30yrs old. There are illustrations on a lot of the pages, which just made me a bit giddy. I am amazed the lady didn’t spot my excitement and charge me a whole lot more.

Apart from the cover, it would have been a nice edition just to keep as is… but that wouldn’t be me. I do already have a much older complete works, that is special to me and I would never consider altering.

but this one was just asking to be coloured in.

For some time now I have been seeing people do ‘bible art’. I believe it is called Bible Journalling and you can see lots of examples online, HERE are a few on Pinterest.  This involves creating art in the margins of a treasured bible. I had no idea that some bibles come with very large margins specifically for taking notes I guess, but these areas work just as well for doing artwork. The ones I have seen have all been inspired by the verses on that page.

Anyhoo, back to Shakespeare. I loved the idea of creating art in a treasured book, while still being able to read the book and not completely cover up the text. not being religious, when I spotted this book I knew it would be perfect.

So before I even started I deconstructed the book, taking off the cover. That will become an entirely separate project. I am thinking of making a linen cover and embroidering it with some stumpwork. This would fit in nicely with the whole Elizabethan era…. but I digress..

As the book is so chunky, to use the pages on the left I found they needed to be propped up. So I popped a stack of books under this side. This gives me a stable surface on which to work.

The first play is The Tempest, and begins with a scene set on a ship on a stormy sea. Now I did at first think I would like to decorate the pages with images that directly relate to the text, but came to the conclusion that was putting too many restrictions upon myself. So I plan to make some kind of art that is inspired by the text, it could be realistic or abstract, whatever I feel like at the time. 

So I found myself searching for inspirational images of waves, and as often happens, one image leads to another, that leads to youtube, that leads to pinterest, and so on… eventually I wasn’t looking at real waves at all, and I ended up on THIS PAGE A very eyecatching pattern you will agree. I loved the simplicity of the illusion and in a way it still did look like the clashing of waves.

So, not wanting to copy exactly, I read the instructions once and began in my book. These pages are super thin, and I knew any kind of pen ,in or marker would bleed through. So I added a very thin coat of gel medium first.

Adding some wavy lines with a pencil.

I then went over these with a black fineliner, and added the cross lines to each column.

Next I added a water wash of colour to each column, using Fresco paints in China, Blueberry, Lavender, Eggplant, Glass Blue and Smurf.

I then went over the paint, adding shading with Faber-Castell Pitt pens .


My next layer of colour was with Derwent Coloursoft pencils.


Once all the colouring was done I added further highlights with a white Posca pen.

On the site where I found the pattern, the artist used more coloured shading to achieve his optical illusion. This wasn’t really what I was after, so I only went back in with more black. I wanted the columns to be much stronger , and almost fighting against each other. I used a Mitsubishi uniball eye pen.

This is how the page has ended up, and I quite like it. It does have the feeling of tempestuous colums of water, churning and turning in a storm.

Here it is next to the page of text. i do not plan to work my way through the book, rather I am going to dip in and out, creating on pages as I feel like it. I don’t think every page will have colour… but who knows. On the pages that already have illustrations perhaps I will just colour those in.

Next year sees the 400th anniversary of ShaKespeare's death, there are going to be celebrations all over the world. See some of the details HERE. 

Also next year, as part of the celebrations there will be a full sized 'pop up' replica of the globe theatre built in New Zealand. Once built it will then go on a world tour. See the details HERE. 

Darcy x