Super J

Relax... let Super Jesus take care of your worries

Bullok

Commission from a 3-year old :)

This is a little boy asking me to paint him a poster of his favourite superheroes:

"Nel? Can I please have Batman and WonderWoman and Hulk and Superman and Batman. And Spider-man. Thanks Nel"

Preliminary sketch:

Toying with the idea of the superheroes taking a selfie. I have WonderWoman at the top in the middle as an overseeing figure, with Hulk in top left, Superman and Spider-man flanking little Finn, and Batman taking the photo on the right. 

First composition

After I found the photo of Finn sitting on dad's shoulders I changed the composition and decided to make Finn's dad Hulk. It naturally follows that his mom is WonderWoman, but clearly I hadn't found the right positioning for her yet. I still like Spider-man and Superman flanking the boy, as they are the most well-known heroes with the brighter colours.

Moving onto new and exciting bits

Put the flag to rest for now, after my disastrous attempts with a different Wacom tablet set-up:

I'm so impatient. I had the time to work on this after a long absence, and I got bored in the first 10 minutes. But, instead of giving up altogether, I decided it was time for the buildings in the background. And yes, here I used vector shapes and gradient fills to create the base. I figured that it's pointless trying to draw a straight line by hand on a computer. Mike and Leo would agree, I'm sure :)

Now I'm excited all over again!

Pizza Express birthday email

Ok so this is not something I've made / am making, but it is highly relevant to all the many hours I've spent in my digital life trying to get HTML emails to display properly. I just got this from Pizza Express - my birthday is coming up soon, and they sent me a happy birthday email. When I opened it, it looked like this:

Cute enough,but then I clicked 'display images' out of habit, and instantly realised that the image above was built using tables, with the image to be loaded cut up into a thousand little pieces to fit into the layout. As someone who has worked exhaustively with tables, I know that the cute pixel image above probably took wayyyy longer than the email with images:

which, incidentally, also has my name on it :) I like it, it makes me happy, and I will probably go to Pizza Express for my birthday...

Highly frustrating

Downtime in a new office, so it's back to New York. Started where I left off on the bottom right bit of detail, but soon got very tired of it and was just messing it up, so I moved to a new section. In this office the computers are set up with minimum flexibility to avoid virus downloads and other illegal software and add-ons being installed and clogging up the machines. This means I can't install new tablet driver software, which means my Wacom is functioning like a mouse. A designer I know from a few years ago used to find it odd that I have my pen mapped to the screen, and couldn't work in it. ASfter attempting to fill in some time here painting NYC, I absolutely cannot understand how he works with it in mouse mode. I've hit Undo so many times I might as well be working backwards, because the point of reference keeps shifting, so it's not like painting IRL anymore.

Giving up now, although it was nice to be painting Times Square now that I've been there :)

Working it

So I don't get a lot of time to work on this, in between freelancing and all my other projects, but when I can I try to really devote some detail-time, rather than just rushing through it... I'm getting there, but I'm doing a lot of re-working.

It's also harder than I thought!

Discovered that I can't get away with random blobs of colour for all the people, especially not in the foreground... a) I wasn;t getting the right overall colour, and b) blobs don't look like people. So I created a colour palette of the main colours (I 'mixed' them myself!) and so limited my palette to the tones that would match the dusk sky in the final painting.

I also gathered up my resolve, banished my laziness and zoomed in to do some detail on the crowd in front.

While maintaining my casual, Impressionist excuse for impatience, of course ;-)

Maybe it is art....

I got bored of the people, so started on the billboards. I love how the medium allows for so much light. It's like the best of watercolour, oil and acrylic combined. Without any of the mess.

Also markers and pastels :)

Is this art? (part2)

Then, somewhere between trying to hand-paint (read Wacom tablet and pen) the circular holes of the Francis P. Duffy memorial and worrying about whether I could use the text tool for the inscriptions on it, I decided, f*ck it - this is not a homework assignment. I'm having fun. So I left the debate over art with teh memorial and moved on to the areas I originally thought would be cool to work on.

I desaturated the crowd so I could splash away with my paintbrush without having the original image dictate colour. Yes, I added a Bevel effect to the paint so it would look Impasto. Like I had squeezed the blobs of colour straight out of the tubes. I am now making up the rules as I go along...

I reckon if Van Gogh had a PC with Photoshop he would take full advantage of the medium...

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Is this art?

So I have some time on my hands, because I often freelance at agencies that book me in for weeks at a time, and then sometimes don't have enough work to cover all 8 hours of the day. I can't do a lot in these situations, because I'm almost always on computers with the bare minimum for my job, and I don't carry all my other project files with me all the time. Dropbox is pretty useful in these situations.

Anyway, mostly I have Photoshop and the Internet. And an appetite for creativity that won't quit. Today I started a new Photoshop project, but I'm not sure if it qualifies as art. You see, I'm lazy when it comes to certain things like drawing from memory. Lazy or perhaps just not confident enough that it will turn out looking right, and then I will have wasted time on it, when what I actually want to do is play around with colours and shadows and lighting and all the other cool effects you add on once the basic structure looks good. Colouring in, really.

The question that keeps going through my head while I'm doing this is: "is it art?"

Here is my base picture. It almost looks like a painting already, which is what drew me to it in the first place.

I'll be honest, I don't even really know where I'm going with it. Nevertheless, I've started copying out the shapes and thinking about the colours. (Maybe this is what the comic book colour team does?)

My art education kicked in and prompted me tostart at the back, so I could do layers towards the front. Then I realised this isn't paint, and it would work better to start from the front, so that the shape panels wouldn't block colour from behind.

At some point, while deciding how best to recreate the granite texture on the memorial stone in front, I decided that, to qualify as something that isn't just a copy of the original, I would have to insert some traditional art. So I made the tentative decision to avoid the Photoshop Gradient tool, and, after using the Noise filter, I decided I wouldn't use that again either.

Or the Bevel and Emboss, or Drop Shadow. Hmmm. My laziness safety switch just tripped.

The Wedding Bracelet comes to life!

EVENTUALLY got the stuff from the Bead shop! Had to wait till the weekend to put it all together, but it was totally worth it... I did this without thinking much about it - in retrospect i would have taken the memory wire coil and made a mark on it with permanent ink in a straight line from the one end of the coil to the other (to mark where the loops end / begin) because it's very hard to keep it all together all the time!

First thing to do is make a small loop at the end of the coil to stop the beads. I used my girl's small computer pliers - the memory wire is relatively easy to bend.

First bead is on! I started with a loop of white seed beads, and threaded them by using the open end of the coil as a hook to pick them up - sort of made me thought of a sugar bird funneling nectar down its beak :). Yes - that is my foot holding down the bottom end of the coil - i'm sure there are appropriate tools, but i don't have patience or money enough for that!

Next came a loop of silver-lined glass beads that I picked up from the local market on Saturday after having a sudden panic attack about not having enough beads!

After that I added the cat-eye semi-opaque, semi-grey beads - these were cool to work with because they slipped down the coil by themselves, instead of me having to push them down. Again in retrospect, i discovered that, by stretching the coil apart upwards (forcing the loops further apart and more vertical), even the smaller beads slipped down effortlessly :)

All ready for the aisle!

The Wedding bracelet - hunting

Love is a river, ties you to me... also with beads and memory wire.

I trawled the internet for the bracelet in my head, but to my great indignance, NO-ONE has thought to create it for me to buy. So, with 2 weeks to go, and nothing forthcoming from House of Fraser, Debenhams, Accessorize, bloody Any women's shop, I've decided to make it myself.

I found this awesome online shop - imaginatively called The Bead Shop - in Manchester (http://www.the-beadshop.co.uk/) and almost every bead I could conjure up in the wedding accessory of my dreams. Guess what? I don't have to settle for pearls! I don't have to add 20 years to my age in the process! And I can STILL look stylish! How bizarre.

This is what I've bought:

All arrives hopefully early this week...

The first thing I did when I arrived in the UK

Of all the things I suddenly realised once I had relocated to London back in 2006, the fact that I missed sewing was the weirdest. It's as if I became aware, through having the luxury of a workspace and hoards of hobby shops taken away, how very much I wanted those things. I hadn't even considered that it would take a long time to set up the connections, the space, the tools and the material store I had built up over many years back home, and one of the first things I noticed about London was the distinct absence of art and hobby warehouses I was accustomed to having around the corner.

Anyway - this is what the first few months of creative-withdrawal symptoms caused me to create: A fold-up Backgammon Board. I think the desire for sewing was stirred up by a donated sewing machine from my fiance's mom - thanks Aunty Liz ;-) - and I liked the idea of incorporating it into the final product.

I used two fairly large pine picture frames for the base and frame of the board, removing the glass / perspex completely:

Sanding down the corners with sandpaper, and varnishing the wood to get rid of splinters:

Fixing the two frames together with hinges so that the 'board' opens up for playing and closes for storage:

I then went down to the local haberdashery and bought a meter of dark blue denim fabric and a meter of white denim / canvas fabric. The light blue backside of the blue denim served as a third colour for the board.

Sewing! I cut the big panels of dark blue denim to cover the hardboard piece that comes inside the frames, and then cut 12 light blue triangles and 12 white ones for the backgammon play area, finishing their edges off with white zig-zag stitching:

Fixed these to the main denim panels, and stitched the edges down with a broad, dense stitch to cover any fraying bits. Instead of trying to hide the stitching, which is difficult with denim, I made a feature out of it.

I cut two extra bits of left over white cloth to match the main panels, then stitched them to the back of the main panels to create a sort of sleeve out of the two panels, to pull over the picture frame hardboards. Then i fixed the hardboards back in place. The pic on the left is the back of the frames, the pic on the right is the front, with the panels in place inside the frames.

The last bit to do was the counters or checkers. Backgammon requires 15 checkers of each colour, and I needed something with unusual texture to complement the denim texture of the board:

The checkers needed to be a little thicker than the 2p and 10p pieces I had in mind, so I doubled them up, sticking them back to back (with the queen's face showing on both sides) with normal adhesive (£3,60 in total :)

Munny Munny Munny

Halloween Munny for a custom Munny competition held at They Walk Among Us in Richmond...

I made a whole apple with Fimo clay, but broke out the bite chunk before baking it to get an authentic break texture. After baking I painted it with normal acrylic, then glazed it with about 6 layers of clear acrylic nail varnish.

The bandages are made from narrow strips of frayed canvas soaked in white PVA. This was a mistake, as the paint takes forever to dry - but I'm not sure what I would use instead. Possibly acrylic could work. The idea is to wrap the wet strips around the Munny and let the drying paint act as a glue.

Dried out red capsicum pips (baked in the oven) mixed with cotton wool and orange acrylic paint.

Fly on by sweet angel

Weekend project number 1. Or actually it's number 12 or so, but this is the first one I'm blogging about. I'm trying to renew some of our old t-shirts to get more life out of them, while at the same time saving money on new ones for these ideas in my head. Using old T's also takes off the pressure of getting it right first time...

So I wanted wings on my back. I've been thinking a lot about this two-tshirt thing, with cuts in the top layer to show the colour of the bottom layer. I'll post my first experiment in this department soon, but I want to get this one out now. I rummaged through our cupboards and found a brown T neither of us has worn more than twice, and a white T that was always too small. Perfect for the bottom layer, in other words.

I start by sewing key points of the two T's together. This is essential with two different brands or cuts of shirt, to ensure they sit properly on one another. With two T's from the same range I only sew the line from the neck to the shoulders. It is important to sew only on the seams to avoid the material pulling funny or showing the sewing. That rhymes.

Next I drape the shirt over a chair to keep the shape while i trace the wings on the back. I looked for the perfect pair of wings on Google, and photoShopped all the inside detail out, so that i had only the outlines. I chose wings with an expressive outline, because the material doesn't allow for much detail once cut. It's more important to get the overall shape right.

Then I print them out on A4, and cut out the inside to create a stencil.

This gets pinned onto the back of the T, and using a laundry marker i trace the outline onto the shirt. From previous experience I now know to trace it a little smaller than i need it to be, because the idea is for the material to pull back and curl over a little.

Now i simply hand-stitch all along the marked lines with small, close zig-zag stitches that show only very minimally on the front of the shirt. This stitch has a name, but I don't know it in English... The stitching catches both layers of T-shirt.

Then comes the fun part - cutting out the inside of the wings from the top T-shirt layer. I cut about 2mm away from the stitched line, to give the material room to curve over.

And that's it - I have wings on my back... :)