Module 6 Wallhanging completed

I've had confirmation from Sian that I have now completed Module 6 and the Certificate.  Wow - at last!
Here is a photo of my finished wallhanging.  The theme I chose was conservation of water.

'No Rain Today'

Here is the supporting design work:

And some detail photos:

'Drip, Drop'

'Wavy'

Those of you who were at Summer School last year will recognise a technique learned with Sandra Meech - using printed black and white images and adding colour, then stitch.  I used this to create my quilted background.  Dense machine stitching creates the wavy effect in the reservoir motifs.

What next?  Another challenge:
When adding colour to the background I used masks:

You can see in this photo that I have already removed one mask and another is partly lifted from the background.  This is what happened after:

I immediately linked this back to my Washburn Wild Water design:

So next I shall consider what technique to use to produce this 3D interpretation of wild water ....

I swam the Channel!

Oh, the other reason for lack of postings last year was because I was busy completing the Aspire Channel Swim, fundraising for spinally injured people.

And I swam to France and back - 2832 lengths in my local swimming pool, in ten weeks. Work that out, that's nearly 300 lengths a week - well two weeks I did far less, and other weeks I did far more.

If you would like to make a donation to help rehabilitate people with spinal injuries please visit my JustGiving page - there's a link on the left! Many thanks

Summer Sketchbook

At last I've sorted various technical problems and I am able to update my blog. Here is the final plum sketch from last summer's sketchbook. I went away for the weekend, but took my plums with me.

Day 4 - lines and backgrounds

When preparing backgrounds yesterday I also selected pics of trees - plums grow on trees (and trees play a large part in my life). I chose a fibre tip pen for the first drawing.

Not my favourite drawing. I had picked a leaf from a copper beech tree on Monday so decided to draw this on another page using a second pic of the same tree. I turned my sketchbook round to draw this:

and then turned it round again for my second attempt at drawing the leaf, concentrating on different types of line:

Sketchbook Day 4 - a personal background

I hunted through the few magazines I had here, and found a jumper to illustrate how I felt last week when starting to draw.

Even though I had crumpled the pic, my fine line fibre tip pen slid across the surface - an interesting drawing experience after using pencils so much.

I attempted both Day 3 and Day 4 today. I've found other pics which I will add to my sketchbook before I continue drawing.

BTW I was watching BBC Four "The Art of Cornwall" yesterday and heard Peter Lanyon say, "you throw yourself off the cliff every time you start and you've got to fly, swim, duck or something and come out the other end." So reassuring ......
If you missed the programme it's really worth catching it on IPlayer.

Sketchbook Day 3

After a busy weekend I had to move the plum to a different room, and the light was casting shadow from a slightly different angle. I had placed my plum on a white sheet of A6 paper, and I rotated this to achieve a more complete shadow. So you need to look at this one from a different angle:

Here's the sketchbook page scanned on the straight:

The diagonal line, faintly drawn on LHS, indicates the angle of the page to the edge of my table.

Summer Sketchbook Challenge

I got off to a good start the first weekend, using herb tea and Yorkshire tea to colour the pages of my sketchbook. However, my first drawing day was last Thursday morning. I chose a plum from my bowl of fruit. Unfortunately my camera is not working at the moment, and rather than wait to sort out another camera, I decided to scan the pages of my sketchbook and upload what I have achieved so far.

My son spent some time with me, eating his breakfast at the same table, whilst I was drawing. He has a natural talent for drawing and is very good at explaining techniques. He doesn't understand why I don't have the same knowledge. (I was allowed to choose only one craft/art subject at school so I chose needlework and gave up art lessons at 14 yrs old :-(( ).

I explained to him that picking up a pencil and starting to draw in my sketchbook felt like standing on the edge of a cliff ready to make the first step off when abseiling (yes, I have done that!). He suggested 'working large' and making grid marks to guide my positioning on the page. He then gave me a lesson in which pencils to use when shading, hence this tonal sketch.