Paintings...yes I said paintings!!!

I've been having a blast doing a Suziblu class. Highly reccommended!

As I showed you a couple of post back, we were learning how to do the faces. Like draw them from scratch. Suzi gives a formula that WORKS! And it is fun fun fun....afer learning the technique of drawing, we kept practising until we got the "petite doll" that we wanted to work with. Here's my Flower Fairy sketch that I decided was going to be my one to work with. Itraced her onto watercolour paper from this sketch in my sketchbook.

So then we moved onto bakgrounds. Layers of card, tissue, stamps etc and drippy drippy with the colourwash and water and paint. I figured I needed some pink in there for the fairy, but I ended up making 3 backgrounds, all based on blue and ochre, but each had a different 3rd colour, green, orange and pink

...I'm thinking tryptych on the wall here...about time I did some stuff to decorate a wall somewhere.....just for me....

Once happy ith the BKGD, we stuck down the people we made onto the backgrounds. Faces are coloured with pencils (coloursoft or prismas) the clothing and hair were painted to strengthen the paper before cutting out.
Stuck that down...I used Claudine's Matte Gel Medium which I LOVE ...my fave product in the world (I must show you my 1 minute transfer technique in a video of that).....and her gesso is yummo too....and it smells like...oranges...so nice....

Oh and as you can see I decided to give my flower fairy a flower and a birdcage as embellishments...these are drawn onto AB gessoed paper...I wanted to add paint to that later....and yes, the flower is missing the stalk, and the birdcage is missing its legs.....they will get added someday soon....

Her dress is scrumbo scrapping paper that fitted the colour scheme nicely..we all have to cheat a little sometimes!

So here's the crunch, I know this background malarkey pretty well being a self taught "splodger" for at least a decade, but I have alwasy made my things on top of the background pop or contrast with the BKGD. But Suzi has been getting us to melt the BKGD and the feature together so you don't always see where one finishes and the other starts. WHOA does this go against the grain of what I have done in the past....so today I forced myself to stamp over the doll and the BG at the same time (nearly died) and I added texture with molding paste through stencils, and tried to bring colour from the back to the front. I also blinged her up with glitter, byzantia bits from Stewart Gill, and applied lots of glazes to all kinds of places, as well as interference paints...I think the list is endless...anyway, so much for slap bang do it fast ...oh no....this is the real deal artist stuff where you slow it down, take your time, and relax into it and...well I really enjoyed myself.....blissful creativity.....

So here we are at week 4 of the class and this is where I am up to. We still have to add beeswax to the top of this, so the meltpot and quilting iron will be out next week. I'm not sure if I'm done yet before beeswaxing. I still need to add text, birdcage legs...and I'm very tempted to add some watchparts too, alsthough I may wait to embed those in the beeswax...I want some more 3 dimensional stuff in there....eventually......

Can you believe I have 2 more of these to do too...I have got them done to the stuck down stage, just need to do the "integration' part on them both....

You probably can't see the details from the scan, but there are crushed up byzantia bits on the flower petals and on the skirt, interference paints in all kind of places, glittery eyelids and toes.....very girlie, but still in my rich colours that I adore....

So if you want to learn this, go take a Suziblu class! You won't regret it!!

NEWSFLASH: We have rubber goodies for you rubba lovers next week....Mark pressed the moulds for 4 new squiggly minis today, so they will go online tomorrow I expect. And there are 10 new Ink and the Dog minis coming too....can hardly contain myself...new babies to play with......

APOLOGY: If you are waiting for orders it because we can't count. lol We stuffed up on the amount of rubber we (read MARK) thought WE had in stock.....but when we (HE) went to get the next box from the storage pile...we were all out. And of course it's all my fault apparently. ALthough rubber ordeing and counting is definately a BLUE job, not a PINK job (many of you know about how our job descriptions are blue or pink in this household....and in my book rubber ordering is deffo BLUE......Anyway we were expecting it here on Tuesday...but nothing arrived. Rang the rubber supplier and of course, they have a new system and so delivery is taking longer than they originally told us (HIM...Mark aka rubber-boy....just to be clear...he has a special superman suit that he wears while pressing it too....yes really.....), so we have been advised we SHOULD have rubber tomorrow (Thursday). Don't panic...I'm not!! I'm having LOADS of fun doing my paintings.... so all orders will be sent out first class before the weekend.......we never ran out of rubber before...I think it's quite funny....and this is why I am having so much fun making art because I have some time!!! So maybe we should run out of rubber more often....KIDDING!!! So that was an official apology...on behalf of Mark....blogging is a pink job....

Leandra