The Foibles of Bloggle and What Happens to Your Coffee

Hello Friends!

I hope my new word Bloggle amuses you.  What does it mean I hear you whisper amongst yourselves?  Well, it's a combination of blogger and boggle, because my mind is boggling at what Blogger is doing hence bloggle. 

Google's latest trick sent to frustrate and confound me is to allow me to publish your kind comments and the next thing I'm finding them inexplicably moved into my spam box despite the fact that I have published them!!!

Blogger is also not keeping me informed of new followers, but I note my numbers have gone up, so Welcome, Welcome to my little corner of the world.

As regular readers will recall I recently took part in an online Twinchie art challenge.  It was only twelve days, but I made a lot more than 12 miniature pieces of art. So as always, the question arises of how to store them?   Many of you may remember I enjoy making custom made boxes for things, so that's exactly what I did, and here it is.  I used a Martha Stewart punch for the central motif and glued a piece of old gold card to the underside which also provides stability.

Under construction, with clamps holding wet glue while it all cures.

It's nice to be able to make custom fit boxes for just about anything. 

You may recall one of the small pieces was a 2 inch square with a lighthouse on it. Well, I enjoyed making that one so much that I did a small  A5 piece using the two inch piece as my source of inspiration here. it is now, following the Twinchie version.

Here is the A5, the rays of light need working on.

I have been commissioned to make another one of these lighthouse paintings. How exciting is that?

And now the big question.  What happens to your coffee when you put it alongside your paint water?  Why, this of course!

It can be worse when your paint water looks like pineapple juice.  I will say no more on the subject.

Until next time

Stay safe, stay well

Debbie xx

Twinchies {what is a Twinchie, you ask?}

Hello Friends!

A Twinchie It's a small piece of art worked on a two inch square substrate. The substrate can be anything you like. It can be watercolour card. Yupo paper. Wood. Fabric. You could even use a cut up cornflakes packet if you want. as long as your size is two inches square.

I decided. on two things for this challenge. Firstly to use as much of my Kuratake paints to get the feel for them and to experiment with them a little. secondly, not to invest oodles of time in this. project. So setting a time limit of no more than about 20 minutes per card. One of the days did take a little bit longer than 20 minutes. But I'm glad I allowed myself that because I'm very pleased with the outcome.

The prompt for day 5 was SPILL.
I did three interpretations over two cards. One was a literal spill of liquid. The other one is a small seascape with light spilling from the lighthouse and the ocean spilling on the shore.

Day 6  was KNOT I did a bow of ribbon and two stylised Celtic knots

Day 7 prompt was TOUCHING so I created pattern by touching the painted surfaces with a damp fingertip.  Three twinchies, and also playing with a collage editing element.

Day 8 prompt was BOX so I did a tongue~in~cheek interpretation.  Five of them!

Day 9 was  FERN

Since I have discovered how to create a photo montage I don't have to post individual photos!

Day 10 RIVER. This was a challenge. I've seen so many multiple images put together to make a bigger image I just had to give it a go. It was another challenge getting the composite in the correct order!

Day 11 POEM

A tricksy one today. I will likely return with something else, but wrote this quote on the back of a preprepared tile.

and finally ~~~ 

Day 12 MOON

That wraps up this challenge.  There are always a lot of challenges happening this time of year, but I'm taking a short break from challenges now. The next one I will be picking up is not a challenge, but an online retreats.   It's time once more for the Artist's Soul Gathering, hosted by Ida Andersen Lang, where we will be honouring the divine feminine in over a dozen works of art taught by twelve different creative spirits. 

Heartfelt thanks for your support and your kind words and encouragement over these past few weeks.  I do hope you will come and have a look at what I'll be doing in the ASG.  I won't be doing them all, as these are larger pieces of work, quite labour intensive, and therefore time consuming. as I do not sell my art, I'm afraid I cannot devote all day, every day, to it much as I would dearly love to. 

Until next time.

Stay well Stay safe.

Debbie x

Spam, Notifications and Nonsuchstuff

Hello friends!

No one else has mentioned issues with Blogger so I'm wondering if it's my computer. Here's what's been happening. 

When any of you kindly leaves a comment on my blog, at the moment it's coming through just fine. However, when I reply to your comments, my comments seem to end up in spam. Of course, then I have to move them to where they are meant to be. This is hot on the heels of the last problem I had when my comments were showing up as anonymous for weeks. That seems to have self righted I hope I'm not speaking too soon!

The other thing that's been happening recently is I'm hearing from a lot of you that you are no longer getting notifications when I post a blog. Well, I'm sorry I can't shed any light on that at all. I have checked with friends who get notifications and some of them are saying yes. They're getting notifications, whereas others are saying no. Sorry but I do not know why this is, or what to do to rectify.

I wish I knew what to suggest to those of you who are experiencing mild angst over not getting your notifications but I really don't know what to say. I really don't.

If I'm perfectly honest, I don't know how half of you follow me anymore Whether you're getting email notifications, blogger notifications or some other sorts of notifications. There've been so many changes since I started writing a blog. I haven't been able to keep up with them. 

The weather has been frightful I know many of you can relate to this in whatever part of the world you live in. We have had an unprecedentedly early named storm of the season. Storm Anthoni Lashed us last weekend with winds of in excess of 70 miles an hour and torrential rain. The man who comes to mow my lawn for me will have his work cut out. No pun intended. fFor the grass which a few short weeks ago was brown and very dead looking has done what the grass does best: respond to the rain and shot up like nobody's business.

I have not seen anything of the couple who were coming to volunteer to help me with the garden for months now. The last time I saw them, they said they'd be in touch within two or three weeks and outlined what they'd hoped to achieve. That was the last I saw or heard from them. So my garden has been left to get on with it itself.

The lands on which my cottage is built used to be a field. It was well known for its blackberries. It took my father many months of working in his spare time to clear the land from the vines. For several years. everything was turned over to growing our own food. However, since my decline in health, I have not been able to keep on top of clearing anything and gradually the blackberry vines are starting to take over the land again.  What was once my beautiful raspberry and blackcurrant patch is once more chock full of blackberry vines. Due to having Parkinson's my balance isn't great, consequently I don't think I'll be able to pick them myself and I'll have to offer them up to somebody who wants to come in and pick for themselves.

I actually offered the land up free to anybody. if they want to clear it, to grow their own vegetables. I was surprised I didn't get any takers on it. When the local allotments came up for grabs, they flew out the window, so to speak. I really expected to have a few people say they were interested. But no.

Unable to garden now and grow things I have to content myself with painting flowers instead. Here is a sunflower I painted from another online class in the Anna Mason Nature Studio.  If I don't tell you that I didn't have the correct paints and consequently have lost the luminosity that only watercolour can deliver, you would not think any different, would you? It's a perfectly acceptable painting of a sunflower, except it's not as it's supposed to be. but only I know that. And now, of course, you do.  

So to occupy my time, I have got involved in yet another online art challenge. This one is only for 10 days.  It's a Twinchie/Inchie challenge.  I have been eager to do something with the new Kuratake paints that I got. This will do nicely to play with them.  They come up very well on black paper, much more colour than on white. So I took some black card stock and cut it into 2 inch squares. 2 inches is the maximum size permitted for this challenge but you can use any substrate. that you choose. so paper, card, wood,  fabric, I suppose you could use glass, metal, slate, whatever, it's your choice as long as it isn't bigger than two inches. Here's what I've done so far. The first 4 days.  As they are quick to complete some days I've done more than one.

Prompt FROTH

A Froth of Impressionistic flowers

Frothy Clouds

Prompt BARK

Three interpretations

Prompt WEAVE

one 2d and one 3d

Prompt MAGNOLIA

They're quite quickly done. They probably take longer to dry than they take to paint. I hope you enjoy them as much as I'm having fun from them.

Until next time

Stay safe, stay well

Debbie xo

Bumblebees and The Home Straight.

 Hello friends,

Well, this sees the end of the index card art challenge for this year. I'm going to backtrack two pieces from last week's share. primarily because it's a key piece to what came next.

Here's the first piece you remember. you probably remember the slightly more. sophisticated black, gold and purple design.

One evening, I was looking at the half flower that sits below the row of three flowers In the triangle shape.  All of a sudden the one on the top appeared to be a stylised bumblebee.  So that meant further investigation I figured with a few tweaks, it could be drawn out into a stylised bumblebee. So that is what happened next And in my last entry, I shared this.

Now, if nothing else can be said about this pattern. it was fiddly. So I decided to experiment a little bit further, especially as I was still in experimental mode with the new paints. This is what happened. I filled the space with the stylised bumblebee. Then I drew in the vein detail on the wings using micron pen.  This became

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Not a bad effort. and it certainly was easier painting the larger one than it was fiddling about with all those tiny bees!

No, as some of you will remember, I shared  the swatch samples that I made. on both black and white paper in the last entry here, So it followed that I would have to repeat this bumblebee. on black. So out came the gesso. I have to wait rather impatiently for it to dry before I could paint this. I know it's not identical, but it's close enough as they say for government work. the contrast on the black paper is incredible don't you think? the colours really pop and come off the page. So this became

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If I'm totally honest, I can see this bumblebee becoming a full blown experiment on all sorts of different mediums in the near future.

54/61  Another version.

Today marks the home straight, just seven more days left to go.

55/61 I decided to stop working on the bees, so I made a checkerboard. pattern of ink. of intense paints.and filled each one with a different pattern that I have been working on or using during the past 2 months. It wasn't easy using a paintbrush to do the mark making that I've become so used to doing with the fine tipped micron pen.

56/61  A motif I often revisit

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And finally. . .

 

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And that's a wrap. ICAD is over for another 10 months.   Thank you to everyone who's followed along and especially for those who have left kind comments on my efforts, they've really been appreciated.  Your encouragement keeps me going!

Until next time.

stay well stay safe.

Debbie xx