Salaric

A few days back on Google Plus I saw a post about a drawing challenge – now I was in the middle of not only trying to run a poetry writing drive but trying to do the drive myself as well as plan things for a science-art exhibition this month and start gearing up for festival season – so I thought I would join in 😀

Insane yes!

The challenge as set by Margareth Osju and is to draw 100 birds in 100 days – I am off course already lagging behind but hope to catch up!

There is a Google Plus circle and Margareth’s blog.

I shall be posting the pictures on my Picture Books and Illustrations blog Orange Monster.

This first one has been done as a request for my husband, most of the drawings will not be this style at all. The picture is called Gaia and is part of my visual poetry journal.

I have joined a site called Pinterest after some nagging from friends who want to see my cake pops on there. It is a lovely platform for sharing inspirational images and useful tutorials. I’ve only been on their about a week but am having lots of fun posting links to my websites – it picks up photos from the blog post but links back to your site. I have also been re-pinning some of the fantastic images and useful things on there. Unlike Facebooks share facility it is easy to tack back where the image has come from and it collects together all the pins (me adding things) and repins.

The pins/repins are all catagorised into boards which you give titles too. So far I have Gaia which are about nature and the Earth, Magiks which is pretty stuff with a bit of spiritual thrown in, Body Art; which is all the tattoos and nail painting and the like, Make and Do which is craft and DIY. Lastly there is one I’ve named Food and Drink which is about food and drink and parties 🙂

My user name is 5affy (Saffy with a five instead of the S).

I was very excited to find that people had already shared some of my photos on their – mainly from this and my cooking blog 🙂

I have a new camera thanks to birthday money from family. It is the best one I’ve ever had and was £80 reduced from £125. I had been wanting to take my photography forward slightly and was finding the old one very frustrating with it’s lack of function and optics. It was not as good as the first digital camera we had that we lost during the floods but it sustained me for 4 years of happy snapping and many an arty shot!

My photography site has been running for just over a year now and the more I look at my photos the more I see how I could improve them. It is still not one where you can remove the lenses (I don’t think anyway – I still need to read the manual).

I mainly use photography to illustrate my blogs – not least of which is this very blog. I take photos of the different stages of making things to help illustrate a point. I also like creating art within the photo itself and this has led me to be able to just go through my stock of photos for album covers and things.

The camera is also essential for the production of my Wiggly Pet stories or web-comic.

I am looking forward to playing lots with the camera 🙂

It’s 14 megapixel 18 X optical and has a bit sticking out the side to hold it which has already reduced the shake I tend to get on photos without flash and the pics it can take at low light levels is amazing 🙂

Because I am running the WoPoWriMo (World Poetry Writing Month) website this year and am going to be meeting up with writers I’ve had my Tea pictures turned into postcards and stickers. I’m really pleased with how they have turned out 🙂

Just before we moved to the new house about a year ago, I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help my little girls or anybody else understand and learn Lojban (a constructed language) but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened – there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.

Then last week I saw it was Lojban’s 25th birthday and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.

A full first story will hopefully be appearing on my Wiggly Pets blog soon 🙂

Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi’i – meaning welcome.

Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven’t decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages – mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages – suggestions welcome 🙂

Image is a link to a free PDF of the book!

A few years ago to entertain my then just turned 4 yr old I wrote a series of kids poems and we made a little book with me handwriting the poems and drawing some quick pictures in felt tip pen. My little girl liked it so much she took it to school with her where to my embarassement the head master saw it and thought it was great.

I typed up the poems and took photos of the book assembly – for this blog and thought that was the end off it all – especially when the book got a cup of water spilt on it (much to my annoyance and the tears of a little one). But I then ended up writing a Little Book of Poetry for all sorts of other events and festivals like christmas and the birth of my second child and to stop the heart ache of the first ones destruction I scanned the pictures I drew.

People kept telling me that I should release the books but I thought I should digitise the pictures so I spent ages trying to draw the pumpkins and things but I found that it just came out looking like a cheap hobbled together image and that was not what I wanted. Then I came to the realisation that this was not needed and that the felt pen look was a good for kids books. So I drew pictures and have run them through a few filters and things to clean them up etc… (I found that different sketch books have slightly different coloured paper in them which needed to be sorted etc…).

But the up shot of all this is that tomorrow I am having a virtual launch party of an e-book (PDF) of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. I will be giving things away and there will be author interactions etc… The PDF will be available for FREE until midnight on the 31st of October 🙂

Enjoy.

A few years ago I donated a piece of my art work – yesterday it was returned to me – as it had spent the last couple of years sitting in a store room. The piece is called The Cricket Gear and was the first piece I painted for my GCSE’s. I was 14 and it took me a terms worth of lessons plus a holiday of painting on the kitchen table to do. I had it in mind as a present for my Granddad but unfortunately he died before it was released from the school (they kept several of my pieces for a while and the teacher even offered to buy them off of me!)

It is framed behind glass so I can’t get a good photo of it and it is somewhat sun faded compared to how it was. It is a picture I would be annoyed to paint now – I look at it and see mistakes but at the same time I know it surpasses stuff I have seen for sale for alot of money.

I’m not sure how I feel about the return – I am hurt as I think any artist would be to be honest but at least it is no longer sitting in a store room. And I wonder about art and society – my husband points out that it is hard for people to tell the difference between a print and a painting and that even hand painted stuff is cheap as cheap from other countries and is bulk bought in. I put a lot of work into this piece and part of me was arrogant enough to feel that I was leaving a legacy by donating it.

Fortunately this as happened at a time when there are many brilliant things happening to me in the creative world so it is not as devastating as it could have been. Also I feel like I am being childish in being upset – I can’t expect people to want my stuff after all.

Of course my mother is over the moon as she had been annoyed I’d given it away in the first place and has a place set aside for it on her wall.

I spent the last week doing craft and writing with people at Centre Arts. And boy have we crammed it in!

We made cards, Olympic torches and medals, decorated volcanos, made leaf garlands, sock puppets, upcycled skirts out of old t-shirts, beaded rings, made hair bands, pom poms, created cardboard looms and wove, knitted and crotcheted, plaited/braided, worked on story ideas and comic book sketches, we made pencil pots, templates and phones.

Here are the photos 🙂

And of course we had CAKE! The who to of which is on my cooking blog.

Jeany has really enjoyed this week and has even been looking after the plant! The baby too has been tiring herself out 🙂 The kids and adults who have come along have all enjoyed themselves 🙂 I shall be running it again next week starting on Tuesday!

The next two weeks from Tuesday will see me running Centre Arts in Cheltenham. Apart from the wonderful art work which deserves a visit in it’s own right! There is information about the excellent courses they run during term time and drop in craft workshops run by me 🙂

Tuesdays I will be doing paper craft and beading

Wednesdays I will be doing Fun with Fabrics

Thursdays is Story Time for the little ones at 1 and creative writing for adults 3-5 kids are welcome as I have lots of stuff to keep them occupied

Fridays is yarn craft and the knitting doctor

Saturdays is Upcycling and Junk Art

There will also be cake and drinks 🙂

I am attempting to do some gothic arts and cute scary crafts for Halloween – this is my first sketch 🙂