The Polar Bear is Finished

With arctic blue absolutely everywhere, sometimes a girl just craves a bit or pink!

And Tasha got it in this beautiful cashmere hand embroidered and beaded cape.

Doesn't she look beautiful?  With all that thick fur, she doesn't need the cape for warmth.  It's purely a fashion statement.

So I finished felting my polar bear, then, although I thought she was very cute, I asked myself what I could do to make her special and this is what I came up with.  I bought a grab bag of wet felted cashmere sweater parts on Etsy, then used them to make this "crazy quilt" style cape.  I lined it with a scrap of reclaimed white satin.  I joined the cashmere pieces with feather stitch using 2 strands of DMC cotton embroidery thread, then added the hex-cut crystal seed beads.  The cape closes with a thread loop over a vintage glass button.  The final touch was the beaded fringe.

This cape took many hours to make, but I think it was worth it.  What I have here is a totally unique piece that I will put in my Etsy shop and hope that Tasha finds a home with someone who loves her as much as I do!

A New Venture

I am excited to begin working in a series (or, more likely, several) of little animal sculptures centered around an imaginary place, in this case, Milkweed Manor.  Each sculpture will be an illustration of part of a story of what happens with the characters there.  The first piece in the Milkweed Manor series is this pair of squirrel sisters, Lily and Effie.  My London-born grandmother's name was Lilian and one of her older sister's names was Effie.  It means a lot to me to name these characters after them.

I want these to be among my higher end sculptures, so I've taken a lot of time with detail which is time-consuming during the sculpting but even more so in the glazing.

I would like to find a better gray glaze for the squirrel glaze, but this will do for now.  The true grays that I see seem flat and lifeless, so I chose this one that settles into the texture and breaks both blue gray and a reddish color.  Some squirrels, after all, do have that reddish coloring, especially the English ones.

I will accompany each of the sculptures with a little book with their hand-written story from the woods behind Milkweed Manor.  The image above - a watercolor I painted - will be the front cover.  On each one, I will add by hand touches of beautiful micro glitter on the milkweed seeds.

This is the back cover - again, one of my watercolor paintings.  This is Colwyn the Gray, the Chronicler for Milkweed Manor.  He, of course, will have his own sculpture and stories.

A Needle Felting First!

I've been doing a lot of needle felting lately.  After creating several mice, a pair of reindeer, a donkey, a meerkat, and a larger reindeer (all of which are in my Etsy shop which you can reach by clicking the link in the right margin of this page), I suddenly realized that I'd never done one of my favorite animals - a polar bear!  So I launched into a new project.

As always, the first step was to create the armature.  As part of that, I made impressively sized polymer clay claws, cured them with heat, then glued them to the toes I had included in the armature.

Next was to begin the wrapping, which you see here.  You can also see, in the background, a print-out of an image of a polar bear skeleton that I found on the web.  I use images of an animal's skeleton to plan and build my armatures, figuring if it's a good foundation for the real animal, it's also a good foundation for the needle-felted one.

Just as an aside, I've been thinking for a few months now that I'd like to do some instructional videos for needle felting and clay sculpting and maybe a few other things.  Maybe after the new year I'll look into that - think it would be fun...

Finished Barn Owl watercolor

Here's the finished Barn Owl painting.  I continue to enjoy this decorative motif-based style.  It's the only way, so far, that I've been able to make much sense of watercolor painting.  That may be because I like to use transparent colors only and no masking fluid.  Those choices make things a bit difficult with having to paint one object around, rather than over, another (unless you don't mind the first one peeking through the second one!).

This painting is different from my others in that I put in a fading wash around the edges.  I like it.  I also used one of Daniel Smith's duochrome watercolors around the owl's head giving a bit of a halo effect.  I love using metallics, even though it means that prints are not feasible.

As for my new palette, I like it very much and recommend it.  But there is one thing I would change.  For me, the paint wells are too deep.  When I have the palette on the table beside the painting-in-progress, I can't see into the paint wells.  I need to put the palette on a lower side table to see the paint colors very well.  I'm going to pass that comment on to Robax Engineering, the manufacturer of these wonderful paint palettes.

Using the New Palette

I'm painting a barn owl surrounded by foliage and floral motifs, using my new watercolor palette from Robax Engineering.  For whatever reason, I always seem to experience a bit of a block when I use a new tool or approach, but I pushed through it and got this far today.

I keep thinking how much easier this would be to do with acrylic, but I'm pushing myself to learn watercolor because I believe that the colors can be so beautiful, and I like the funky things the paint can do, like the "blooms" in the leaves.

The hardest part so far was the Indigo shading around the edges.  I made several passes at it, while I think a more experienced watercolorist would get the value correct the first time.

But as for the palette, it took a bit of getting used to.  Although it holds virtually the same number of colors as the palette I'm used to (19 vs 18) it's much bigger so I've had to rearrange my work space.  The mixing areas are also different - wedge shapes instead of rectangles - but I'm getting used to that as well.  By the way, even using staining colors, the mixing trays washed out beautifully.

There was nothing wrong with the palette I was using before, but what attracted me to this one is the well liners that allow me to switch out colors.  So far, so good.

The Old Way and the New Way

My watercolor palette has served me well.  Not so many color wells, but quite enough.  From this many colors I found I could mix about anything.  And plenty of mixing space too.

But ever since taking an online class from Danielle Donaldson I've been fascinated by watercolor palettes from Robax engineering.  This engineering company somehow got into making watercolor palettes based on design ideas from various artists.  I've been scrutinizing them for over six months now and finally took the plunge.

The one I was initially interested in had wells for 85 colors!  But after using my old palette for a while I realized that so many colors sitting in front of me would just be confusing and in the end I got this one with 19 paint wells.  It's 12 inches in diameter.

The super cool thing though, is that you can buy liners for the wells (which I did) which allows you to easily switch out colors!

These are the colors I chose (all Daniel Smith):

New Gamboge

Quinacridone Gold

Quinacridone Sienna

Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet

English Red Ochre

Quinacridone Rose

Burnt Umber

Sepia

Permanent Brown

Rose of Ultramarine

Indancrone Blue

Indigo

Imperial Purple

Deep Sap Greem

Terre Verte

Hooker's Green

Sap Green

Phthalo Green Blue Shade

Prussian Green

- not necessarily an orthodox selection, but I really like these colors.

Forest Guides

After doing the collage with the young woman and ermine both wearing fascinators, I found that I enjoyed drawing people - something new for me.  So I decided to do a series of three such pieces, each with a young woman and an animal.  For this one, I chose a rabbit and wanted to make the woman a red head in a very green setting, suggestive of Ireland.  After completing theawings separately, I began the collage.

I had a beautiful magazine page with a mystical looking landscape and decided to use it as the first layer in the upper background.  As I always do, in an effort to avoid wrinkle when gluing coated papers such as magazine pages, I dampened both the front and back of the page before gluing it down.  But despite my careful preparation, it began wrinkling anyway so I kept smoothing it out with a brush.  I was completely focused on the wrinkle and missed the fact that the ink was beginning to smear, leaving the image that I liked so much largely obscured.  The lesson I learned was to spray these images with workable fixative before glueing them down.

I was discouraged, but continued with the first few layers of the collage. 

At this point I decided that her right eye looked wrong and tried to fix it.  In the process I pretty much messed it up.  I nearly threw the piece away.  I can't remember ever doing that before.  But I decided that I wouldn't learn anything that way and determined to finish it and hope for the best.

Next I began to apply color.  One of my priorities was to eliminate the white halo around the rabbit ears.  This halo is a result of tearing out the rabbit drawing then gluing it against the dark background.  I also added more collage elements to soften the bottom edge of the drawing of the woman.

At this stage I really didn't like the piece and once more almost threw it away.  I also thought that I probably should give up on drawing people and stick to animals.  I also didn't like her looking straight ahead at the viewer - it felt sort of creepy.

Nonetheless, I pushed ahead.  I decided to push the characters back and add an element to compete with them visually, namely the collaged leaf spray in front of her.  I deepened the color in her hair and stenciled a few leaves over the top of her head.  Basically, I just kept fooling with it and added more color washes, widening the color range of the background.  I was also careful to add a few subtle areas of Burnt Sienna washes to repeat the color of her hair elsewhere in the piece.

I added a few bronze paint spirals - the beginning of the final decorations which are my favorite part of the collage process.

I decided to add something of interest at her forehead and, since this piece is supposed to suggest Ireland with all the greens, the red hair, and the rabbit, I decided on a Celtic knot.  I drew the knot on a piece of tracing paper then inked the lines and painted it with gold and bronze metallic paints.  I carefully ripped the motif out of the piece of tracing paper and glued it in place.  I was expecting to see a bit of the edges of the tracing paper as a translucent blur but, surprisingly, the tracing paper completely disappeared.  

By the way, I've had trouble in the past with tracing paper wrinkling when glued, so I brushed it with water first.  After dampening the front side, it spontaneously transformed into a tight roll.  I unrolled it and dampened the back at which point it flattened out and I could glue it down.

I got the vintage green glass jewel from the Etsy shop Yummy Treasures.  I originally was going to glue it in the center of the Celtic knot but then decided to place it where you see it.  I added more little decorations including the shards of foil (from various types of chocolates) and then was done.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with it and am glad I kept going.  But I still wish I had chosen a less startling pose for her.  Next time...