Salaric

At our Scouts Centenary Camp I found myself in the craft tent were they had a fantastic badge maker!

It arrived with lots of shiny metal badges and clear discs to be pressed onto the top. It came with the press and a circle cutter so I was impressed (ie instead of having to try and cut printed circles out with saftey scissors you just put this short sort of cylinder down on the paper and whizz the handle around which I presume moves a blade along the inside, creating a perfect circle).

You give the circles of paper to the kids who decorate it, I used colouring pens and pencils. The design then gets sandwiched between the badge back and the clear plastic disc and then put in the machine. The guy then pushed the handle down and one nice shiny badge came out

Equipment:

*White ceramic tiles

*Candle and matches

*Toothpicks

*Sealant/hairspray

*Masking tape

As it is the Scouting Centenary this year there have been lots of commemorative events, one of which was the Centenary Camp at our District’s camp. I found myself in the craft tent there and I was to do tile engraving, though it was stretching the term engraving slightly I felt!

I had never done this before and had a bag full of equipment and some vague instructions so I arrived two hours before the kids were due, in order to have a go and work out the best way of doing it!

My first issue was that I had tea lights and normal tall candles without any candlesticks, so I ended up using the tea lights as candlesticks for the larger candles after a brief aborted attempt at smoking the tiles on tea lights!

The idea of this craft activity was that you black out the tile over the candle and then use a toothpick to draw a picture or pattern, then you spray it with a sealant - in this case hair lacquer.

I was obviously a little concerned about burnt fingers, which was my main reason for experimenting, but other pitfalls soon became apparent.

You have to get the tile touching the flame so that soot actually gets deposited onto the tile, making it black, but if you go too close, wax is precipitated onto the tile, making drawing hard and giving affected areas a shiny, almost brown, look. I used a cloth to wipe affected areas and put them back over the candle.

I found holding the tile at a 40 degree angle over the candle flame was effective in getting a lot of soot deposited onto the tiles. Also angling the thing towards you so that you can see how things are going helped a lot, but it did mean lowering your line of sight slightly for most people.

My first attempt was very blotchy with lots of wax on it and smeary fingerprints all round the edge but I drew on it anyway to see how well that worked and whether the hairspray would actually seal the picture.

The main issue the children and I had with this was trying not to rest your hand on the tile whilst drawing on it - we all had to re-smoke the resulting white patch were we had wiped the soot off!

Also I found that you had to be ‘light’ handed with the toothpick otherwise it would jump and skid on the tile, ruining the picture or writing you were attempting!

I was only allowed to do this craft with the older children, ie Scouts and Explorer Scouts. Even so, I was concerned about the burnt fingers and after trying to black out a second tile found that though I was no longer making it blotchy or getting wax on it, I just could not make the edges neat, as you have to hold the tile!

I then hit upon the idea of making a border of some sort and because I have been painting lots recently I wondered on the idea of using masking tape around the edge of the tile - this would hopefully create a nice neat border and prevent the children from burning their fingers.

I stole some masking tape from the Junk Art stall and proceed to experiment - my main concern had been that the tape would catch fire or it just wouldn’t work as a neat border. However it worked better than I had expected, though obviously I then had to stress that you needed to move the tile about, otherwise the masking tape would catch fire, which did happen a couple of times resulting in a brown sticky patch on the tile - this took some wiping off!

Blacking out the tile over the candle.

Smoked out tile ready to engrave!

One of the Explorer’s tiles - he decided to have a go without a border.

Masking tape as a border.

Here are some of the kids’ finished tiles!

My first attempt Second attempt

The only thing I found abit iffy about this project is that you had to spray the tiles several times with the hairspray and still it is only just touch safe. Anything touching it will scrape the picture off it! I’m wondering if better quality spray would be a better idea or perhaps actually using proper sealant.

My fathers’ day present to my dad was a garden dragon ornament, depicting a dragon emerging from an egg, and it’s made out of a cement/concrete type material, created to look like stone. My dad appeared to be chuffed with this dragon and proceeded to paint it in fantastic detail, bringing it to life!

He loves painting toy solders and little scale models and when my brother and I were young, made us a whole fantastic range of toys! I asked him if he would write up what he did to the dragon - here is his account.

MY FATHERS’ DAY PRESENT It was a dragon, as mentioned above, given to me by my daughter. As the finish was a rather dull grey I decided to paint it to resemble a real dragon. Of course as I have never seen a real one I was forced to guess at the colouring. I was very happy to find that the eyes are made of glass and look really authentic.

THE METHOD I used an artist’s brush, with bristles that come to a point, for the fine details. I believe it is called a rigger, and I used a larger one of the same type for the bigger areas. However, I think that an artist’s flat brush might have been better for covering these parts. The paint was Humbrol enamel, which I purchased in a model shop. It is also available in hobby shops. As it is a garden ornament, I finished the whole thing in yacht varnish to protect the paint from the elements.

The egg is the largest part of the ornament that I wanted as a single colour, so I painted it first - grey. Well, yes it is only a shade lighter than the cement but it is somehow better if the whole thing is covered in paint. As there are some pieces of shell that are inside out, I highlighted them with grey paint mixed with yellow.

The next part is, of course, the dragon. I chose a dark green with which I painted the whole dragon, then I mixed a little yellow and/or white into the green to create a lighter green for highlighting the creature’s throat and chest. I also highlighted around the eyes.

The dragon’s claws were painted yellow and the ridge behind the claws a dark grey. I added some black to the light grey.

The nostrils are black and the cracks in the shell are a very dark grey; I added a lot of black this time.

The base the egg stands on is either a representation of earth or rock, so I used light, medium and dark brown paint. I used actual dark brown paint for the dark brown areas and simply added yellow in medium and large amounts for the other two shades.

Finally, the dragon’s mouth. This is pink and the tongue is red. I just added white to the red to obtain the pink.

I should have already mentioned that it is a really good idea to make sure that the paint is dry before adding another colour. With model enamel I usually leave two hours drying time between coats. If it is going to stand in the garden I would leave it overnight to dry completely, before adding a coat of yacht varnish to protect the paint from weather damage.

You might want to read Alien Landscape in Acrylics I and II before you read this one!

Ok, first off I am using the word denizen to represent any organism, dead or alive, in the pictures which include the plant-like structures - remember, this is an alien world.

The furthest away ‘trees’ are all on the skyline as they are markers of the different hills or zones in the pictures; they are dark and more elegant and fine than the closer ‘trees’.

They were painted using:

Mars black 036

I used a smallish brush where the bristles tapered to a nice point - I think it was just a smallish ’round’ with half the bristles missing. The way I painted these was to think about plants, especially trees in winter when they have no leaves. I find these structures fun but also hard to paint and make look natural. In the end the only way I can do it is to ‘feel’ the shape of the trees, not just to visualise it in my mind. In fact, if I think too much about how they actually look then I can’t paint them. :/

The middle lot of trees were based more on smaller, more leafy plants, rather than trees, and for this I used a much thicker brush to give them a more stubby and inelegant appearence.

Colour-wise I used:

Cadmium red deep 504

Copper (IMIT) 230

The ‘trees’ in the foreground were based this time on corals, with slightly more elegant branches than the middle ones, but with the characteristic conical base I associate with certain corals and bryozoans. At this stage I wanted one of them to be a very simple, open structure with the idea that I would have an ethereal flower-like display coming from it.

These were painted in:

Cadmium yellow 620

I had to do several coats of the yellow to get any depth of colour - this gave them a nice streaky see-through look.

I was sort of thinking of it as an underwater/thick atmosphere world, so having just read up on lots of pre-Cambrian, earliest fossil life stuff, I began to imagine what sort of creatures would exist in this world. However, this being a completely alien world, I thought that maybe there would be more spacial dimensions, so not all the creature is apparent from any given angle. This led to some interesting ideas that I am keeping for some short stories.

Still, this freed things up a bit - I had a quick flick through some of my paleontology books and thought about the dynamics of motion in fluids. Being of terrestrial origin, I, of course, could not escape the idea of fish, streamlined with no fins, or if they do have them they are not currently visible. I painted the little shoal of three in the top right-hand corner using:

Mars black 036

Titanium white 009

I basically put two dollops of the colours next to each other and scooped the smallish brush through them. I did the fish with smooth flowing lines so that the colours remained in strips, defining the shapes of the creatures.

Using the same colours, I painted the centipede-type creature which was inspired by a fossil I saw when I was seventeen on the Isle of Arran in the Inner Hebrides. Again, the thought that not all the creature was present within the visual and physical realm of this world helped greatly as the chunkyness of my chosen style would have made painting twenty odd articulate limbs a complete nightmare!

Again, I tried to do smooth definite lines, this time aiming not to overly mix the black and the white.

Again, I came back to the concept of fish but this time I was thinking of the monsters that lay in the deep recesses of our own oceans with strange protrusions and vicious spikes.

I only used the Mars black for the two fish; again I just did simple shapes.

The last non-humanoid denizen is a cross between a jellyfish and a crab, and took its inspiriation straight from the Burgess Shales and the soft bodied creatures preserved in it.

I again used only the black and white paint, the body being a central balloon disc thing. I tried to make sure the colours swirled around, following its contours. The legs/feelers etc were done as simple lines; I tried to get specific colours in groups to give it more structure and authenticity - the same with the length of the protrusions.

This brings us back to the last denizen, the rasta-alien flower!

Ok, confession - I didn’t intend to paint it - it was supposed to be some sort of strange alien flower thing, so I painted the green pod with that in mind. I used:

Emerald green 335

Sap green 375

and just a little bit of

Buff titanium 024

I was trying to get a twisted look to it but when I saw what I’d painted, it just said alien body pod to me, and before I knew what I was doing, I was painting the face with the Mars black. Again, this is one of those things I’m not sure I can actually explain how to paint - I just had the feeling of the shapes inside me and there wasn’t really any thinking involved!

So there you have it - on Alien Landscape in Acrylics - my husband is scared of the alien so the picture lurks in my craft area. I haven’t done anything with it yet, but feel that it should be the front cover of something. (Well, actually, no I don’t because like with all my work I think - well I could have just done this slightly differently and then it would have been good enough).

I decided that some dark low-lying hills would look right with the sky, but I was thinking alien planet by this point and thought that the atmosphere could well be thicker and more like water than air. I began thinking of shallow type, dune-like hills, in black shimmering metal sand. Without air it wouldn’t oxidise would it? Ie it wouldn’t rust and the grains of alien sand would be little dull pieces of metal.

I painted these in a similar way to the sky, except that I used a smaller brush with the bristles all grouped together with a rounded end (officially known as ’rounds’). I also made sure that instead of horizontal lines I made nice shallow swoops, contouring the hills. I used the lighter colours to highlight subtly the dividing lines between one hill and the next, giving depth of field to the picture.

I also made sure that the further-away hills were lighter shades with different colours mixed in; this is the opposite to what you would normally paint. I felt it would create a nice effect and I also added just a touch of a bronze metallic paint, just to give it a slight metallic lustre in the right light. This, of course, is completely lost in the photo!

I painted the furthest-away hill first using :

Mars black 036

Middle grey 064 (Daler-Rowan Series A, Cryla acrylic)

Titanium white 009

Sap green 375

Copper 230 (IMIT)

The middle hill was painted using :

Mars black 036

Lemon yellow 651

Cadmium orange 619

Copper (IMIT) 230

The bottom/foreground hill was painted using :

Mars black 036

Cadmium orange 619

Titanium white 009

Copper (IMIT) 230

Again I left it to dry overnight before starting on the denizens of the picture!

Sorry about the flash on the photo but it was coming out with the wrong colours without the flash ,and I didn’t want to take it out of the glass protector until I scan it. And then the images will be avaliable over on Point Defect.

I painted this in three sessions, starting with the orange sky/background. I put a generous blob of all the reds, yellows, oranges, whites and a bit of green and black onto my pallete aka a piece of scrap waxy paper or card. I then used a flat square-tipped brush (the official name is apparently a flat brush) from Tesco’s of all places. I really did use only the tiniest amount of green and black.

I then wet the brush and dragged it through the blobs of paint and brushed backwards and forwards on the paper - which is thin mounting card, slightly larger than A4. I dipped the brush back into the paints every now and then, making sure the white caused a streaky effect. Because I am lazy, I don’t tape my paper down, but if you are a proper artist you should use masking tape to tape the paper down, so that it doesn’t move around whilst you paint.

I just paint over my thumb, as I have also discovered that I have to move the piece of paper as soon as I’m finished, otherwise the paint sticks it to the surface I am working on and extracting it again can ruin it.

I waited overnight for it to dry; at this stage I had no idea what I was going to make it, be the sky, or even if it was to be a sky rather than under some fluid or some such. I was quite happy with the dried effect and looked to see which end should be the bottom and which the top, to take advantage of the best ‘cloud patterns’.

Colours used for the sky were:

Cadmium red 503

Cadmium orange 619

Crimson 513

Yellow ochre 663

Lemon yellow 651

Cadmium red deep 504

Cadmium yellow 620

Buff titanium 024

Titanium white 009,

Mars black 036, Sap green 375

(all Daler-Rowney System 3 acrylics)

Ok, I know I promised ages ago to show you all some of my artwork but I haven’t got round to the scanning etc… I have some shoddy pics here I took with the camera of my doodles in a little A5 notebook I have. These really are light doodles though, so don’t expect anything good! They are all done with a Stabilo black pen, point 88, fine 0.4 art no. 88/46.

This was me trying out ideas for webcomics - but found something too similair since.

Ok, I was thinking of gothulu and the like when I drew this - this all started because a gothic horror/dark sci-fi and fantasy imprint is looking for pictures.

More of the same.

This one is based on a dream I had - the style is me mucking about with ideas of how to illustrate something for Al.

Erm.. I was bored?

Ok, this one again was working on styles for Al’s thing.

In desperation with the fact that I appear not to be able to draw anymore I went hunting for a book. Because of the specific project I’m working on, I was excited to find a book called ‘Anatomy for Fantasy Artists’. I copied this from just inside the front cover; first time I’ve done a copy like this in 4 years. :/

I was attempting to manga/cartoonise a photo here.

This is another one from the book - it’s supposed to be the barber’s daughter. The book makes a big point on how difficult it is to draw children and how right that is. I was copying and have managed to draw her older sister who is blatently a teenager!

Floating heads - I was just trying slightly different styles.

Yes well it was late, ok.

I was crossing over styles with this - just doodling really, as they all are!

Again just trying out different styles.

Ok, I was trying to make someone look ill - and the pen slipped but it’s a nosebleed, ok!

I’m addicted to taking millions of photographs! Here are the ones I have dubbed BUBBLES!.

(I still have three new pics to upload!)