It is Saturday, my day 1, which means that I ve got my son all day with me. Before I can get on with "art making", I enjoyed my time with him and managed to get done lots of domestic stuff and some shopping. We had wild mushroom stirfry on toast for lunch and decided to go to a garden center on the top of a hill in the city. We wanted to get plants and seeds to plant now for the coming summer. We found strawberries, beans and cress as well as gorgeous garden candles and some Easter rabbits and eggs !

Once we got home, we cleared patio garden and cut back old and dead leaves of our plants from last year and planted strawberries. We noticed that we did not have enough compost before planting seeds, that has to wait.

It was 7 pm my son fell asleep on the sofa while he watched a video. That means I can start some serious art making.

First I did under drawing. This is the second one of "Primeval, strongly instinctive desires" series which I started recently. I had an inspiration from a book of old maps.
Then I used black permanent ink to trace the lines and give more depth into the drawing.

My son, Cosmo and I have been ill for a week now and have needed more rest than usual. This has caused our body clock to struggle to adjust to daylight saving time. Basically, we get up too early and feel sleepy by 2pm and take a nap and cannot go to bed till midnight. I do not know what time is it now anymore.

Regarding my artmaking, I managed a little progress today.


I finished colouring and then added some gold ink, I tried not to over use it as it should be some nice special addition to the piece. They added really nice gorgeous and divine feel to it, almost like a mural in a Italian Roman-Catholic Church in Medieval. The shine does not show well with this scan, so I will try to photograph it under daylight tomorrow, if the weather allows..... its England so I cannot guarantee.

The Artwork 1 has made me to look up my history textbook from high school. I loved history, specially world history and all the adventurous things talked about in the text book. While I was reading the book in medieval history in the west Europe section, I spotted a beautiful stained glass of a French Cathedral. Below 2 pieces are underpaintings of Artwork 2 and Artwork 3, inspired by the stained glass. They are both size A4 and I used Watercolours for the underpainting.




I then started to work on the Artwork 2. I used the same Black Ink which I used for the Artwork 1 and added more colours by overlaying organic images such as botanical cells and pollens, inspired by Klimt. I used colour pencils here.

I then used Gold Ink to make it more like Klimt's divine world.



Again it does not show in this scan, so I will try to photograph one tomorrow. Another piece I am happy with, considering the time I could spent. This piece may be transformed into a textile work later on the series, with lots of gold thread and colourful silk dupion. I can see some rough image in my mind, but not fully. I think I need more similar drawing work before making it with fabric and threads.

Due to my family commitments, I was forced to keep the blog fairly short over the weekend, but hopefully, I would like to post more detailed explanation of how and why I created the pieces and any story behind it(if any :-)) during weekdays.

Coco

It was a very first, beautiful English spring day today, so my son, Cosmo and I decided to go out for a walk and do some shopping. Here is the picture to show you how beautiful England can be...
We bought garden gadgets, a large bag of compost for planting and handmade savory pies for lunch. Did some utterly domestic things as well like paying bills and buying quarterly bus-pass ! I feel that I am sorted for a while to concentrate on this 30dayartist ! Once we returned to home we planted cress seeds which we bought on Saturday at a garden centre. On the packet, it said that it would be ready to eat in 10-14 days. I was suspicious, but after 2 hours, they started to germinate ! Amazing ! Are they naturally fast growing ? Or soaked in a chemical to accelerate their growth ?

Anyway I dropped him at a nursery and had whole afternoon for myself. I decided to pursue some textile work which I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post. I prepared 2 underlining, so they will be Artwork 4 & 5. In below photos, I just show you one of them due to file size capacity for this blog, but will post both completed works when they are done.

I prepared 2 x calico(muslin) underlining. First of all, pined the hems and stitched them neatly.
Then layered a bright red poli-cotton fabric on the underlining. On it, I randomly scattered various silk dupion cut-offs, gold threads and ribbons of various width and textures.
Then laid a gold-purple-ish translucent organdy and tacked to temporary hold them together.

Hello all, I am posting today's blog early, so that I can get on with new painting work I meant to start earlier today. Things did not work out as I planned since I spent too long hours working on textile works (Artwork4 & 5). Once I started beading, I just devoted myself sawing sand like beads onto the textile. May be its easier to show you the pics than explaining my effort in words.

I am becoming more and more into art making but less meticulous about documenting it. I forgot to photograph details of the process... I am sorry. Without the photos, things are not fun for you guys. But I ve got some photos I took after realising that I had to. It was after sunset, so light was not good and with a digital camera with a cheap built-in flash, things are not going to be any better. I also tried to capture the gold ink detail of Artwork 1 ~ 3, but the results were not favorable either, so forget about it. I might be able to take decent pics with my 35mm Canon.


Anyway, I finished Artwork 5 "Green Night". It was first titled "Blue Night", but I had green thread and ribbons and sand like copper beads, I decided to go for a theme of Green. I wanted this piece to be different to Artwork 4 "Red Night", so I used more geometric pattern(straight line) stitches. Again, there are lots of different textures, hue of and green and gold and sheen. The real copper beads were worth the effort as well. They are real tiny, I needed to get a special set of needles for beading this time. Since the beads work was in focus with this piece, I did not use metalic thread, instead, used normal poly thread which has mat appearance.

Here are some details.

And this is the finished piece in whole. - Sorry not a good picture, but hopefully it conveys my message.

I spent a couple of hours taking pictures with my 35mm SRL Canon Eos 5 this morning. This is because I was really fed up with my digital camera, Fuji Finepix, how inflexible it can be. I still think 35mm captures better images than digital(pixels). Do not get me wrong, I use my digital more than SRL nowadays, because they are small, light and convenient for everyday snapshots, but when I want something, something serious to turn out as I want, my Canon is more reliable and offers more manual settings as well as great 5 point auto-focus feature. I ve taken the film to a lab this afternoon, and got to wait till Monday afternoon for the prints. I can only x my fingers :-|

Other than the photography project, I did more oil painting today. The first picture is the one I already posted yesterday, Artwork 7, I came up with a title for this painting and I decided to paint similar motifs in a series. I did not forget to take a picture under daylight, it turned out much close to the original. By the way, I had an opportunity to view this site by PC this afternoon, and I noticed that all my pictures look too saturated, I think this is because I use Mac and Mac uses different Gamma setting as default. From now on, I will try to adjust the difference by slightly lightning the images. Or if I remember correctly, I think Photoshop offers a feature to correct the Gamma Setting, I will take a look once I post this blog.

Cosmo asked me to read books today so, I ended up reading him a several books before taking him to the nursery at 1pm. I love the children's books as much as he does. When I was a child, my mother was very generous about buying books and often took me to a local library, so I always had so many books to choose from. Mysterious and adventurous stories accompanied by lavishly coloured pictures, I think my love of history and literarture is deep rooted in those childhood experience.

Today's art pieces are inspired by those picture books.

I said in yesterday's blog that I did not know what to do for today, but by the time I was on the bus from nursery after dropping him, I knew what I wanted to do for today. In my mind, I had very specific detail of the image and how the detail should look, I was tempted to use Gouache as medium for today's pieces. I have not used them much, but I knew that they have translucent to opaque look while Watercolours are transparent. I wanted that opaque layers look.

Anyway, these are the finished pieces. I did 2 different colour scheme.