Our one year old brought this home from nursery – they literally took a pre-made photo frame and got her to paint it in PVA and then sprinkle little metallic plastic shapes (the type used in table confetti) on it.
This is quite effective – even if she did get a few shapes on the plastic film that covers the photograph!
I made several of these cards for friends’ weddings, some with blue writing, some with purple and some with pink.
I started by folding a piece of white glittery card in four; this card came in a large bulk pack of different colours and textures from Costco, and is slightly bigger than A4. I then selected the paper punches I wanted to use – the correct letters for ‘Enjoy’ and the little bride and groom – which are two seperate punches, the dove and horseshoes, as I thought these were sufficiently representative of matromony.
I then stamped the shapes out of wrapping paper that I have kept from the presants my husband and I received at our own wedding – the silver in fact actually came from an envolope from a card we got!
I then arranged the shapes to my satisfaction and, using pritt stick, glued them in place.
I’m quite pleased with this design.
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)
On Space Camp with the Cubs we made aliens out of New Clay, lolly sticks, goggly eyes and pipe cleaner (renamed as modelling straws or something) and anything else we had lying about.
The kids were pretty much let loose with the stuff, which they squidged into a myriad of shapes. Numbers of goggly eyes varied drastically and the pipe cleaners made great tenticles or hair!
Their creations, some of which were very imaginative, were left to air dry on a table for the rest of the weekend.
Of course the extraterrestrials needed some sort of transport, so we got the children to make spaceships out of bits of rubbish. There were old tins – with no sharp edges of course – bits of netting bags, cardboard and plastic cones from the middle of the wool cones for knitting machines, odd cut offs of wire and battery casings.
With some aluminium foil and a lot of PVA glue and brown parcel tape, they fashioned their vehicles. The variety of designs was amazing, some functional and others more ‘alien’ to our earthling eyes. 🙂
These were both fun projects suitable for the range of abilities we had present.
As part of the Scouts’ Centenary celebration, the Beavers made a centenary tree together. First of all we got some large pieces of green sugar paper (A3 sort of size) and blu-tacked them to the wall to be the trunk of the tree.
We then got the children to draw around their hands on some ordinary white paper. They then cut the hand shapes out carefully using those little safety scissors with some assistance. They then wrote the names of family members down the fingers of the hands and decorated them with glitter, felt-tip pens and stickers. We then stuck the hands onto the tree trunk as leaves.
The kids loved this one, though I think that because our colony is very small there were not really enough leaves!
I made this monitor decoration for my mum. I used strange almost fluorescent-coloured polymer clay, specifically fimo soft. I used blue for the base, pink for the flower and yellow for the middle. Also needed was a green matchstick for the stem and a sticky pad to turn it into a monitor decoration!
I shaped the blue fimo into a cone with the top slightly flattened, about 1.5cm in diameter at the base. The pink fimo I rolled into a sphere and then flattened it into a rough rose petal shape. The yellow fimo I rolled into a short fat sausage shape with very rounded ends.
I then wrapped the yellow sausage in the pink petal shape to create a flower that looked a bit like a lily.
I then pushed the green matchstick into the bottom of the flower and rolled the area to push the fimo in firmly and neatly around the stick.
I then punched the other end of the matchstick into the blue cone.
I then baked it in a pre-heated over at 130 degrees C for 1/2 hr (30 minutes). Once it had cooled, I pulled the stick out of the blue cone base and then added a bit of glue (UHU) on the stick and poked it back in the whole. This is necessary as the stick would eventually work itself loose, otherwise if it puts up a fight don’t worry about it!
Once the glue had dried I put a little two-sided sticky pad on the bottom so that it can be stuck to the computer monitor!
I made this little Easter basket for my husband’s birthday; it is made of fimo and is about 7cm in diameter. The fluffy chicks came from the Pound Shop.
These are the colours I mixed for the browns to make the twigs: dark brown, yellow, orange and beige.
I then rolled a sphere of the beige to make the base of the nest with.
I then began to flatten it into a disc.
I then rolled sausages of the different brown fimos – these are the twigs!
Then I pressed them gently around the edge of the base, making sure that the first ones arched a bit in the middle, leaving ‘free space’ to allow interweaving of the twigs.
I then chose three bright fimo colours – pink, blue and yellow, for the Easter eggs to go in the nest.
I sliced up the colours and then arranged them so that each egg would get one piece of each colour in different orders and patterns.
I then rolled the three colours into a sphere. I applied slightly more pressure to one end of the sphere whilst rolling it, in order to get the egg shape.
I only did three eggs in the end, as I thought it would look better when it was less crowded and with some fluffy chicks instead!
Ta da!
I made this Easter bonnet from fimo. There was no specific reason behind this project, I just had some extra fimo and in fact was going to make it into a pot but whilst shaping it, it turned mysterously into a hat!
First off I rolled the black fimo into a ball.
I then began shaping this ball into a hat shape. I did this by initially making a depression on the top of the ball and then pinching around this depression with my thumb and forefinger whilst rotating it.
I then had a satifactory hat shape!
I decided that I wanted a nice ribbon and some flowers on the hat (I did consider Easter chicks and the like, but the hat is actually quite small, so decided that though it might be a bit more Eastery, it was also a lot more fiddly).
I rolled a thin 0.5mm diameter sausage of yellow fimo for the ribbon and I also rolled some little balls of fimo to be the middles of the flowers. I then flattened the sausage of yellow fimo and fitted it around the hat, making sure the two ends overlapped and were shaped so that they looked like ribbon blowing in a breeze.
Warning, fimo and other polymer clays are quite brittle and therefore thin structures like the ribbon will be relatively fragile. This is why I made sure the ribbon would have contact with any surface the hat rests on.
I decided that three flowers would look good and rolled 2 balls of blue fimo about 2mm diameter, and one of pink. I gently used the pad of a finger to squash these balls into little discs.
I then placed the yellow bits of fimo in the middle of these discs and gathered them up in three to four little pleats around the yellow. This makes very effective little flowers.
I then put the flowers on the hat by gently pressing them onto the ribbon.
However, it looked over the top so I took two of the flowers off and the result was a lot more eye-pleasing in my opinion!
