Life Book - week 1

I'm taking Tammy's Life Book course this year. It is a year long course and has several guest teachers. Pop a long to http://www.willowing.ning.com if you are interested. This is week one's homework.

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop - Week 5

I was very pleased with the final piece and I will be creating more. If you are interested in taking this workshop, Tammy will have it available on DVD at the end of August. Visit http://www.willowing.ning.com for details. I recommend it.

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop - Week 4

This is work in progress. I do like dodging and burning in Photo-shop. You will see that she is standing at a strange angle! I have fixed this by the time I got to the final piece.

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop - Week 3

Stripes, Text and drawing a simple "creature".

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop - Week 2

In January this year, we had a "works" outing to visit ex-colleagues in L'Escala, Spain. We spend a day in Girona. Mandy and I travelled from Bristol, Kelly and Marcun travelled from Belfast, and Mandi is incumbent in L'Escala. We had a great weekend. The second week of the Digital Dreams course was about creating collages and pdf documents. I also created my own photo-shop brushes for the background.

Dave took the photo (thanks Dave). I tried to squeeze him into the collage but nothing worked. We should have accosted a stranger and asked them to take a photo of us all.

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop - Week 1

The Digital Dreams Workshop has now finished. During week 1 we learned how to use brushes to make a background, along with text and using the dodge and burn tools to turn a flat circle into a sphere. This is certainly easier than using "real" paint! The course is based on Photo-shop CS but I did it successfully with Photo-shop Elements 9.

Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop

I've just signed up for Tammy's Digital Dreams Workshop on willowing.ning.com.




I've done several mixed media painting courses with Tammy, she is an excellent teacher. She provides you with videos to keep. Using videos works for me, you can pause them and rewind them. I have found that I am much more pleased with my paintings since I started taking Tammy's workshops.

This workshop is about using photoshop to create portraits. It is designed for "full blown" PS, but should be adaptable to elements, which is what I will be using.

Willowing Week 5

This week is about embellishments. If you click on the image you will see a much larger version.

Willowing Week 4

Week 4 is about backgrounds.

Willowing Week 3

I am also doing workshops with Tam at www.willowing.ning.com. Week 3 is about shading. I am very pleased with how the girl came out. Her dress is not finished yet. Week 4 is about backgrounds, so this picture will progress then.

Whimisical Characters with Willowing

I'm doing an online workshop with Tammy at www.willowing.ning.com. The first lesson was about composition. The images in the photo are hers, I just placed them.

I was ruler and maths challenged when drawing lines 1/3 across the page, so I folded it into thirds!

Inspired by Klimt

Whilst at Sommerhausen, I used the print gocco to create a silk screen of a copyright free image from Dover. It is part of a picture by Klimt. I believe that it is a portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer. The screen was used to print on a canvas "box".


Once I came home, I decided that I would like to add to it and make it more like the original, and wished that I had placed the image in a different place on the canvas.

The canvas was white, and I painted all apart from the lady black. I then looked for backgrounds that I already had and was lucky to find some watercolour paper painted with yellow and had gold spirals. I have recently started using gel matte medium as a glue rather than PVA. It makes the paper less susceptible to bobbling. Milliande alerted me to this.



I then used some watercolour crayons and thin felt pens to fill up the background. Willowing taught me to wet my watercolour crayons with my brush and then paint rather than drawing with the crayon and then brushing with water. It is surprising how well it works. It is a great way of carrying watercolours with you.



I also stuck some gold sweet papers on to the picture. They form the straps of the dress and the lighter part of the collar. I used bondaweb (wonder under) and my clove iron to do the fixing.



Finally, the collage was "joined together" by some galactica paint from Stewart Gill (it is clear paint with glitter spread throughout it) and my favourite spiral template and bright gold paint from Stewart Gill. There is also some gold embossing powder on it.

It isn't the best painting in the world but given my fear of painting, I am pleased.

Art Journal - January 4th

Todays prompts are "Flowers and Spirals".

I am trying to get more depth into my pictures. I used Neocolour water colour crayons for the petals. Willowing showed me how you could do this by putting your paintbrush onto the bottom end of the crayon and then painting rather than drawing with the crayon and then adding water. This gives you a lot more control.

I watched a video the other day about using sharpies to mimic Copic pens. The author talks about using three shades of each colour, a pale one for the whole "thing" (in my case petal), the darkest one for outlining and a medium shade for shadow. I have achieved more depth than I usually manage, but I am dissatisfied with the amount of blending. For once, the photo makes the page look better than in real life.

Finally, the prompts come from Millande. You can find detail of the project here.

Willowing Girl

I have just painted this picture as a result of viewing Willowing's you tube video on face shading.
She is starting painting classes on feburary 28th 2009 and registration opens in mid January. Pop along to www.willowing.ning.com for more details if you are interested.