I made this card for my friend’s wedding. I had some white card blanks so took one of them, then I had some cards with Just For You in gold writing on a golden shimmery background – these came for a kit I got in the Pound Shop.
I used copydex and glued the writing onto a golden/yellow brown square I had cut to be a nice border. I then glued that to the white card blank which I thought was simple but effective.
Recently I went to the Belgiun city of Bruges. There I was instantly blown away by the medieval architecture. Unfortunately my camera was broken so I had to resort to camera phones and friends’ photos. The buildings are covered in lots of ornamentation which I long to draw; everything also appeared to have a double meaning and to be caught up in symbolism. Arts and crafts seem to have a natural home in the city and the carvings of the stone for the buildings seemed to reflect this.
Out of all the touristy things there, there was one thing I was desperate to do and that was to go and see the Hieronymus Bosch triptych . The piece is called the garden of earthly delights. I have a sort of love hate relationship with this particular artist as his pictures quite frankly scare me but the they are akin to some of the things I was once drawing and I find that the intricacy and detail of the pictures just draw me back again and agian. Now I do not actually have an artistic background education-wise but I have slowly been collecting little bits of knowledge.
In the art gallery/museum I patiently worked my way through the rooms until I fell upon the work naturally and even waited, examining other works whilst others gawped at the triptych. From the pictures I had seen of it I was expecting something massive, surely to fit just so much into it, it needed to be the size of a wall but no! It is not! It is more akin to the size of say, a cupboard door in a standard kitchin, and sits there in a display cabinet.
I was examining it in detail and was lost to the detail of the middle panel which represents earth, noting as many of the strange creatures as I could, then I moved on to examine the hell panel when I got a tap on the shoulder. The curator was standing there and pointed to the queue of people waiting patiently behind me! I uttered a suprised “Oh! Sorry!” and scuttled off. She seemed amused more than angry.
But the picture was haunting me – I longed to go back and examine it but felt that I had used my allowance up and was sad as I wandered the rest of the galleries absorbing information on Flemish Artists. I have to say I feel that whatever was going on in history at the time of these paintings must have been pretty dire. Just the symbolism and graphicness of the drawings and the fact it’s everywhere, even in the fabric of the buildings itself, made me want to investigate more and oddly enough it gave me a story idea involving conspiracy theories and vampires.
We went to the beer houses afterwards – it gave me strange dreams!
I only had a weekend there but I think a week would have been better as there was just so much I wanted to take in arts and crafts-wise.
I went to the Royal Astronomical Society where there was a fantastic glass window which I fell in love with. I have never seen glass in a window done like this – it had the glass textured into a swirl that was coloured subtly with pastel pinks and greens with geometic shapes frosted in. Unfortunately I didn’t get to have a proper look at it as I was enroute to a talk.
I have been entranced by stained glass windows ever since I was a small child and now I have seen a scientific and beautiful stained glass window it has started me thinking. One of the things I want to do when I have the time and the money is to learn how to do stained glass and maybe even glass blowing, though I am a bit scared of that as it can be dangerous and would have to wait until we’ve built the appropriate equipment anyway!
Projects using glass windows that I have so far envisioned:
I would like to put a stained glass window in the bathroom showing a boat and a lighthouse. This I think will be done with leading and no texture to the glass.
I would like to have a wine and cheese board including grapes in the centre of the kitchen window where I plan to have net curtains that swoop either side of the design. I see the grapes as being made of bevelled glass, adding texture and therefore a more three dimensional quality to the picture.
I would like the front door to show scenes of the stream including hills and trees and fields, butterflies, dragonflies and a myriad of other insectile life plus mushrooms and spider webs. For this I think I would really need to find out how to make the unbounded colours and how to texture the glass so as not to completely cut off the light coming in though the door. The door is basically made up of glass panels but I am aware that it might be nicer to completely change the door and have the picture spread across two different mediums, namely wood and glass. I think carving and staining the wood would lend a wonderful depth to the picture but as these are two sets of skills I have yet to acquire it will take a while before this one can be done.
For the living room window I would like to produce a picture of the old water mill next door to us complete with waterfall and flowered rock garden; I even managed to photograph a rainbow over it once which I feel would add a certain enchantment though I am aware that many people may feel this is completely over the top. I think that the waterfall would look very nice in textured glass of some kind. I would want to get in as many of the features without over crowding it as I could. My husband’s grandfather put a lot of the features in like using the old mill wheels as tables and stuff like that so I really want to capture the essance of the place.
The window at the back of the house that overlooks the the stream I feel should be kept mainly clear as a) I do not want to cut the light coming into the room down too much and b) it is the window that is great for watching the birds through on a bird table we have there. But I think that a border round the edges would look nice. A bat in one corner with the moon and clouds fading down to mushrooms and leaf litter with a hedghog snuffling about one side and a leafy tree with birds and ivy and insects, a mouse snuffling about the other. Again I think this is going to have to mostly be unbounded by leading with textured glass being used.
In my daughter’s bedroom I would like to put a storybook scene on the window but with children I don’t think doing anything permanent is a good idea so I am wondering whether I can do the picture on some sort of sheet that I can attache and detach when she wants a change but in a way that we get to keep the pictures. This way the pictures could grow up with her and reflect her interests etc…
The window that faces out to the front of the house in our bedroom I would like to simply paint with barge paint style flowers and designs in a nice border.
On the other window I would like to fade from deep blue through magenta purple, through pink and melon yellow with a silhouette of sand dunes a few palms and a camel trail, with a fine sliver of a crescent moon high in the sky of the picture and a few glinting stars, possibly actually metallic. I have always loved this style of picture and for some reason since I was about 13 have wanted it in my bedroom!
The large double doors at the end of the office I feel should show the fundamentals of maths and computing.
The middle window would show mechanics in motion.
My window would depict a paleo-landscape with trilobites and ammonites.
I’m not sure if any of this is possible and will probably never get the chance to even try but it’s nice designing the project and maybe I’ll get round to at least doing the concept sketches. 🙂
I made this card to show to my scouts an alternative to making spooky halloween things. I got the purple card and the sequins on the card, not to mention the PVA glue, from the Big Box of Spooky Crafts.
I picked out three black star sequins, three metallic orange butterflies sequins, one black circle sequin, two metallic orange three dimensional flower sequins and four metallic green sequins. I then arranged the sequins into a pattern I liked and glued them in place. If you look at the picture you will notice that I stuck one of the flowers onto the black circle, I think this gave a nice effect. Also the purple worked well with the orange and green metallic sequins.
I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London or the V&A as it is known to the locals. I didn’t have a purpose as such, I just thought that as I needed to kill a couple of hours and was in South Kensington it might be nice to wander around in there.
I decided to look at the Raphael Cartoons 1515-1516, The Arts of St Peter and St Paul lent by her Majesty the Queen.
On first entering the room I thought I was in for a great treat as I looked at the large pictures dominating the walls of quite a big gallery but there was dim lighting and the pictures themselves were very dark – I assume the dim lights were to protect them. The lighting there was also caused great glare and reflections from the protective screens they had in front of them. It was also stiflingly hot in there which I would have thought would be bad for the pictures.
The one I really wanted to look at but couldn’t really see any of at all was a tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, this is apparently woven in wool and silk with metal thread and was made as a copy of the painting. As far as I could tell from the write ups Raffaello Sanzio 1483-1520 had made the copies in tapestry form at the request of Pope Leo X, however from further reading I have discovered that Raffaello is Raphael and is responsible for the paintings and they were painted with the idea of turning them into tapistries to rival Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
I would have loved to have got a good look at them and it seems a shame that they are hanging there and are still not really accessible to the public when they should be. The thing that always bugs me about art galleries and museums that I have visited is they never have the postcards for the things I want postcards of.
A planisphere is a device for working out where the planets and constellations are going to be in the sky and as I was doing the Astronomy badge with my Scouts I felt we should make one. So I printed two circles: one of them has all the constellations that are easily recognisable from the northern hemisphere and the other is slightly bigger and has the months round it.
I printed the two circles onto two different pieces of paper and then got the children to cut around the star circle. The second larger circle with the dates on it needed the middle cut out which was a bit more tricky and we had to help a few of them with it.
We then put each of the two pieces of planisphere in a separate laminating pouch each and put them through the laminating machine.
We then cut out the circles again but not the inside bit of the date circle. We made a hole in the middle of both discs using blue tac and a compass point. In the holes that we made we pushed a split pin through and opened it out at the back. Now we could rotate the discs and we had a working planisphere.
I found that there is a shop below the gallery in the Painswick Centre which sells the most amazing stuff (can you tell I’m not local) made by the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen. There really were the most fantastic knitted foods, and glass bowls that I would have loved to be able to afford – I was tempted by the smallest one which was about £17 I think. In the end I bought a strawberry. I then got into a conversation with the young man behind the counter who informed me that the main exhibits were round the back and that it was the Guild’s 75th anniversary!
I went off to look at the Guild’s stuff. There was an entrance fee – I can’t remember what it was exactly but I think it was along the lines of £3. The stuff was amazing, from wooden furniture that really were works of art to knitted sculptures, to more amazing glass work. I picked up a lot of postcards, some of which it turned out were business cards and so were free!
They are there every summer if I remember correctly. They are also sensible and have a website!
I have also discovered that there is a little room above what I think of as the library building in Painswick. It isn’t always open and has different things going on – again I can find no reference to it on the internet, but the works were in the order of 10’s of pounds and a lot of it was very very good.
I personally preferred a lot of the work in this exhibition compared to the Painswick Centre but it didn’t have a cafe, though the people were far more chatty I found.
Again if you’re in the area of the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire etc… it could be worth a visit.
I have been discovering that I am surrounded by local art galleries and exhibitors.
I thought there were some nice pieces of work hanging up though obviously I couldn’t afford the prices which were in the hundreds!
There was even a really cool knitted egg and cress sandwich! It was fantastic.
Admission is free and it’s open from 10am-6pm. The address is:
Painswick Centre (Above the Guild Gallery) Painswick Gloucestestershire GL6 6QQ
The timetable for Summer 08 is:
Andy Lovell, Jo Casling, Jane Garbett: 26th July – 2nd August
Georgina Brocklehurst: 3rd August – 9th August
Jennifer Shonk, Adele Lambert: 10th August – 17th August
Valerie Dugan, Dave Morris, Claire Nayegon: 18th August – 25th August
Unfortunatly there did not seem to be any web addresses anywhere and this was as close as it got for a website for the centre itself :/ But still if you’re in the area you might want to go and have a look!
I have been working on the Astromomy and Astronautics badge with my Scout group and to go with the Coloured Card Solar System, I got them to all make these pom pom comets.
For this you need:
Medium sized pom poms in various colours
Crepe paper in assorted colours
String
Scissors
Glue or tape
Basically we cut crepe paper into strips which they attached to the pom pom to represent the comets’ trail; some of the kids added secondary tails at different angles. We then tied or threaded the string around or through the pom pom.
They then ran round the hall whirling them round their heads to make the ‘comets’ orbit them; the tails fluttered in a pleasing manner 🙂 and only one ended up in the rafters.