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.
