Salaric

I made this card to send to my friend - I wanted to catch the essence of a summer/autumn landscape. I used one sheet of pale blue card because I thought this would look good as the summer sky in the backdrop of the picture. I then constructed the actual picture out of 3D paint pens: yellow, two types of green and a brown.

I folded the card in half to make a large greetings card.

I wanted a very representative picture rather than one that was full of detail and I was also new to the paint pens so was concerned that trying to do too much detail just wouldn’t work. I took the slightly bluer and darker one of the green pens and drew grass along the bottom edge of the card - the grass was made up of lots of short vertical lines ranging slightly in size from 0.5cm - 2.5cm. I made sure they sort of wiggled slightly too, to make it look more like grass.

Taking the second green pen, I added on two curving lines to represent the green rolling hills I had seen in the South Downs during my Duke of Edinburgh Award.

I then took the brown paint pen and constructed what I think of as the ‘bare bones’ of a tree. I had it dominating the left hand side of the picture and let it grow organically from my hands rather than thinking about what it should look like. Again I held an image in my mind of the strangely desolate trees I had seen. It has no leaves because I felt it was late summer in a place that was normally quite windy, though the day represented was calm. They also may well have been too ‘busy’ for the card and ruined its composition.

I then took the yellow pen and drew a small circle just larger than a penny and filled it in with the paint. Then I drew slightly wavy lines coming out from the circle, though I made sure they weren’t touching the circle. The paint pens are quite difficult to use at first and it is similar to trying to writing with icing. You have to keep squeezing the pen uniformly, which is difficult as there is steadily less and less paint in there to squeeze out.

The pens dry raised but they also dry transparent which I hadn’t realised and had initially picked colours for the pastel shades, but I was actually happier with the result when they had dried than I had been with the original.

Last weekend I went to an art exhibition in the cloisters at Gloucester cathedral. The paintings were of parish churches in the area and were lovely clear watercolours with some well-defined outlines in what looked to me like fineliner pen.

Some of the paintings were on sale to raise money for the parish the church in each picture belonged to. The exhibit unfortunately only ran from April 05 2008 to April 12 2008. The artist himself died last year at 89, his name was Alec Brown and he lived in my home village.

The paintings were part of a monumental task he had set himself of painting every church in the Gloucestershire diocese. He got about over halfway with something like 240 paintings out of over 400 subjects/churches. Apart from this project he painted over 2000 pictures - mostly of churches!

To me the pictures held a sort of enchantment, linked with the fact they seemed somehow reminiscent of my field sketches for my undergraduate course, which was in geology. There seemed to be something so crisp and defined in them, bringing out the detail which probably was not all that evident in real life. They looked like the paintings of an engineer or scientist to me. Most of them also had a very flat view as if you were looking at them straight on rather than from a slanted angle. This is something my friend Ella (who is a fantastic photographer) is always telling me makes a good photograph - it appears to also make for good paintings of picturesque churches in the darkest reaches of the British countryside.

I did discover that the artist had indeed been a surveyor and that he did not start painting watercolours until he retired which, considering the accuracy and beauty of the pictures, is absolutely amazing!

I have to confess though that the subject matter was not one that I would feel inclined to hang on my walls, but I would send them on postcards and greetings cards to people. Alec seems to have had the same thing in mind and sold these sorts of things to raise money for various charities. In fact, he had sold over a million prints of his pictures to raise money for various causes and as a result was awarded an MBE.

My brother made this trojan helmet out of a cardboard box for a fancy dress party he was going to. He used one cardboard box that was left over from our house move and some gaffer tape, masking tape, wood glue, newspaper, black acrylic paint and a silver paint pen.

First of all he measured how far apart his eyes were and where his nose was in relation to them and his mouth. Then he drew them on to the cardboard box, making sure there was plenty of space for the rest of the helmet around the ‘face’ he had drawn on. Because of the shape of the helmet, he drew a line coming down from an imaginary triangular shape around the rectangular eyes - roughly at a 45 degree angle - so that when he was cutting it out he could cut through this bit and slide the cardboard over itself in a sort of pleat to allow a more 3D shape. Similar pleats had to be put in at the back of the helmet.

He cut out the facial area first and made sure it fit properly by putting it over his face and folding the cardboard appropriately. The mouth area isn’t a hole like in a normal mask; instead it finished in a sort of lip just above the mouth and has two panels descending down each side.

He cut out a rectangle for the nose with the long side of the rectangle coming down the face, but he only cut three sides of the rectangle, leaving it hinged at the top. He then formed the cardboard into a nice helmet shape. The thickness of the cardboard helped a lot with this as it was double-walled and folded in a nice, smooth way. He taped it all together and then made the sides for the nose so that it stuck out from the helmet.

The fan on top was two identical pieces of card cut into a sweeping point with a triangular insert at the front to give it a flared look. He again taped this together and taped it onto the helmet. He re-enforced the inside with a t-section of cardboard from a cereal packet, which he again taped in place.

Checking everything was securely in place he then glued newspaper over some of it to smooth out some of the joins, and painted it with the black paint.

Once the paint had dried he used the silver paint pen to add detailed adornments like android-esque lines on the face and swirls on the fan bit.

This was amazingly effective and it is actually really sturdy.

I made this pressed flower card for my friend who was having lots of stomach problems. The previous spring I had collected a few petals and leaves from various plants in our garden and pressed them in the book that had inspired the whole project - a pressed flower book I had picked up in a Red Cross book shop. I pressed the flowers by putting them between sheets of tissue paper and kitchen towel, as I like the texture this gives the finished petals. I don’t think this would work for whole flowers rather than individual petals.

Blotting paper is the best thing to use for pressing flowers, but this was one of the first projects I had tried since being a child. I used copydex glue, a fineliner and a card blank with an oval cut-out in it. I got the card blanks from The Works in Cheltenham.

I looked at the petals I had and thought that some of them would make a nice picture of a woman on a hill with long flowing hair. I was thinking wild innocence dancing on the stormy hillside in a sodden pink dress.

I started off by folding out the card so that I could get to the panel behind the oval cut-out. I stuck on the hill, which had been a large white petal, then I stuck on the hair, which had been the petal of an orange-coloured poppy.

I then stuck on the arms and upper torso of the woman - this had been a small white heart-shaped rose petal. I then stuck a pink foxglove petal over the bottom half/pointy bit that’s joined to the flower. This made the formal dress of the dancing woman and was exactly the right shade of pink.

I then stuck on a small ’rounded corners’ triangle for the woman’s face, this had been a small burnt orange fading to red colour before pressing, and now is a lovely deep red.

Once the glue was dry I folded the card back up so that the picture of the woman was trapped in the oval frame and around it at the top and bottom I wrote, “MAY THE LADY DANCE YOU BETTER…” with the fineliner.

This vase was partially designed from leftovers and partially based on mineral textures you find in rocks. It was made using a Sainsbury’s Basic’s glass; orange, egg yoke yellow, mint green and forest green fimo soft. I also used another glass with straight sides as a rolling pin, a chopping board, a plastic sculpting tool with an angled flat blade, and a penknife - plus our oven and baking tray.

To make the green swirls I actually used the off-cuts from around a Christmas tree cookie cutter. I was using the tree shapes primarily, and then when I saw the off-cuts I thought they would look perfect as the sort of ‘veining’ you get in mineral formations - though I must say here I was thinking more about how rocks look in thin slices under the microscope with various filters on them. I was also working with meteorites specifically at the time and so had unusual patterns lodged in my head that begged to be used artistically.

To get the texture I simply cut up the dark green fimo and then squidged it all back together to get it in a nice manageable consistency; I then did the same with the light green. I rolled the colours into two different sausages which I then put next to each other and rolled together. Then I folded the two tone sausage in half and half again. I rolled it into a smooth shape, pinching the ends where I had folded it off, in order to make beads and shells. I then cut the sausage into discs about 1.5mm thick which I arranged into a sort of wonky square. Obviously there were gaps between each of the discs but I used my fingers to try and squidge the discs a bit without distorting the colours too much. This sort of fuses the edges of the discs together.

Once this was done I took a high-sided glass and used it as a rolling pin, making sure that I moved the now sheet of patterned fimo around, otherwise it sticks to the glass rolling pin or the surface that you are working on. The rolling action helps fuse the discs into a sheet nicely - some people use a pasta machine to roll sheets of fimo but I have never tried this personally, so have no idea how well it works.

As I said earlier I then cut out Christmas trees from this and used the off-cuts for this vase. I had lots of bumpy stripes which I wrapped around a glass as a series of rings - I wanted it to be quite natural-looking so the rings were quite irregular. A bit of gentle pressure with a finger pad meant I could blend the fimo into nice continous rings rather than having an abrupt and obvious join, but you have to be careful not to blur the colours in doing this.

Once I had done this I made an orange and yellow fimo sausage which I again cut into discs, but this time I put the discs straight onto the glass and squidged them, smoothing over the bits where they touched each other and the green rings. I covered the entire glass at the rim, overlapping the edge of the glass so that the fimo disc went inside. Once it was entirely covered I took the sculpture tool and ran it around the inside of the glass to get rid of the excess fimo - this left a nice neat rim around the top with a clean interior. I then signed the bottom of the vase and using another high-sided straight glass, I rolled around the vase to help remove fingerprints. Then I placed the finished vase onto the baking tray.

I then baked it for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C.

This week I went to the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Clarence Street, Cheltenham. In gallery 13 they always have special exhibits which at the moment is the Alphabet of Trees.

This was quite an interesting exhibition with what I thought of as quite dark monochrome pictures with suggestive shapes lurking within them. Each print corresponds to a short poem, each of which represents a word to do with plants and trees starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The poems, to my mind, were also dark.

The poems belong to Philip Sharpe and the pictures were a visualisation of these, created by Andrew Judd. I think it was thought-provoking in itself but I also liked the explanation of how the pictures were created.

From the information available about the prints at the museum they were created by relief printing using two blocks - a main or key block, which I assume provided the main body of each picture, and a second tonal block. The main block was cut into lino (linoleum) whilst the secondary blocks used a variety of media such as:

• Wood cuts

• An etching technique involving marking the surface of a lino block with caustic soda - at the museum it said the surface was ‘bitten’ with the soda

• Sand or salt stuck to a block which creates a texture when used with some sort of acrylics

The prints were based on charcoal landscapes that were turned into mono-images from which the printing blocks were cut.

If you happen to be around Cheltenham then it’s worth a look - the museum’s free. Unfortunately this display finishes on the 8th of March. There is apparently a book for sale containing the pictures so once I have sorted out my Amazon account I will add it to this post! Along with more info on printing.

I made this card for my friend’s birthday as his birthday, like mine, falls in the winter months, I wanted to show that the winter landscape can be just as beautiful and majestic as those of summer.

I used a sheet of craft card that was slightly bigger than A4 as it is meant more for mounting work on. It was pale blue with a pink blotchy texture that I felt was representative of the winter sky. I also used some pale blue card, magenta purple card, pink card, pritt stick glue, winter trees (which I had punched out of wrapping paper from my birthday the year before which had pale pinks, purples, blues, whites and silver on them) and a pair of scissors.

I then folded the blue and pink paper first in half longways and then in half again to get an appropriate card size.

I then cut out the swooping hills from the magenta card, measuring it against the bottom of the card. I stuck this one with the pritt stick and then did the same for the pale pink hill which I had swooping in from the other side.

I then cut out a large circle from the pale blue card - about 5cm in diameter - which I stuck on the card as a large cold winter sun.

I then arranged the trees in a way I thought looked aesthetically pleasing and stuck them all on, one at a time. With a shape like these trees there are lots of thin fragile pieces of paper which will pull off or crumple up if you are too rough with the glue. What I did was to carefully lay the shape completely on the end of the pritt stick and then slowly slide it gently over the surface of the glue. I then peeled it off using the thickest part of the shape.

One of my friends has a birthday that happens to fall exactly on Halloween the 31st of October. We could not make it to his birthday party so I made him this card instead.

I used one card blank and enverlope from The Works in Cheltenham and a set of coloured fine liners from WH Smiths.

I then drew on the card, first off the spooky writing - the HAPPY in red as it was supposed to be dripping blood and the BIRTHDAY in gloopy green writing. As you can see from the photos I did this all free hand and as a result had to break up the word birthday over two lines - I would advise that you measure out where you are going to put the letters before hand.

I then drew things in around the writing that I thought suitably halloween scary like the huanted castle upon a rocky jagged hill, the moon peaking out of the clouds and the silohett of the witch on her broom stick! Along the bottom of the card I drew a cualdren with fumes drifting up to form a skeleton - I wasn’t very happy with the skeleton and if I was to redo the card I would dig out the book Greys Anatomy so that I could copy the skeleton rather than trying to work it out as I drew it. There is also an eyeball complete with optive nerve trailing behind it. I also added a ghost in amoungst the writting and a amphora of poison. Anywhere else on the card that I thought needed something I added little flying bats!

I then coloured it all in - like the posion and the castle but I left the writing uncoloured as i felt it would look better.

For all of those who know me and would shoot me if this wasn’t on here!

I make little contemporary figurines called Wiggly Pets; they have their own website but it needs a bit of work on it. I will be posting the link as soon as it is ready. They will also shortly be appearing in their own comic strip on an e-zine but more on that later (ie when I know all the fine details). I have sold a few of these little creatures and they are present now in over six countries!

They are made of polymer clay - mainly FIMO soft, which comes in many colours and textures. Next time I nurse the wiggly woos (baby wiggly pets) to maturity I will take photos of them hatching and the different developmental stages.

But until such times are upon us I feel that the wiggly pets would like you all to know about their new community blog which can be found at http://www.wigglypets.co.uk/. They have lots of adventures and wanted to share them with everybody, I’ve taken most of the photos too, which hopefully will soon be available as postcards for people to purchase.

I painted this picture on black paper/card, A2 size. I painted it during my GCSE’s at age 14; basically I was given a white block of paint, water soluble, and a round paint brush, and I just started painting straight onto the paper. Apologies for the bad photograph.

I started with the pattern on the sleeve of the jumper and progressed from there. I painted over mistakes with black paint, which, if you look carefully at the picture, may become apparent, as the black paint had a slightly more matt texture than the paper and therefore looks like a more solid black.

I was going to give this to my granddad but he unfortunatly died before it was released from the school so I have donated it to the village cricket club as that seemed like the ideal home for it. The photograph is of it hanging in the club in its nice new frame.