Progress- of sorts

Firstly, I have been playing with paperclay and have made my first sea angel head. This is for a Christmas exhibition at the Johnston Collection, a collaboration of all the arty groups in Geelong. I began with a foil base on galvanised wire:

Following a tutorial here, I added the paperclay, beginning with a basic shape and then adding the details. This was great fun and Claudia joined in, making a Little Miss figure.

As you can see I have not yet added the ears, I’m wondering if they are necessary as she will have long hair. The pictures of ship’s figureheads which I have are the inspiration for the sea angels, and they all have ears so I had better add them. She is not quite symmetrical, but I plan to paint her in colours of the deep (a la Maggie Grey), not realistically, so I think she will look fine. Most people have slightly wonky faces anyway!! I have another to do as yet.

Here are my ‘killed catalogues‘ in progress.

This one I plan to embellish with gum tree type features; leaves, gum nuts etc.

This has a combination of quink, moonshadow mists, starburst stains and shimmering mists sprayed.

The next one I embedded some gauze and lace fabric in the gesso, then painted the same as the one above.

I was inspired by Heather’s fantastic chessmen and the gap in the middle for this one. It will be based on Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and have text and WSP heads. A friend has a concrete statue of Alice just the right size, so I hope to  borrow it to do a paper cast.

Next month at the Creative Fibre arts group we will be playing with water soluble paper and paper clay so hopefully I’ll have all these finished to show.

Cheers

School Holiday Fun

We have come to the end of Term 1 holidays here in Victoria, the children are back at school and I’m hoping to get back to some textile art. I always think I’ll have time to achieve so much in the holidays and end up doing so much, none of it from my list!!! After reading about Doreen’s granddaughter and her postcard swapping I decided I should do more to encourage youngest daughter’s creativity, not hard as she loves to do arty stuff. We went to a holiday art class using felt and she is very proud of her Coco bear:

We followed this up with some felting, inspired by the felt beads made by Mary MacVoy.

As the youngest with two older brothers, Claudia gets a fairly hard time so we had some girl time out.
We went to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden show, where they had some great children’s activities with easels for drawing with a variety of media, face painting, some very funny interactive creatures and a free plant potting activity. She had a great time and bought some painted toadstools to put in ‘her’ garden with the free bulbs she was given along with the native plant Aussie garden guru Don Burke gave her. Then we went to our hotel for the night where she again received lots of special attention. The next day we went shopping in Bridge Rd, Richmond, famous for it’s designer outlets and then to the Melbourne Zoo. Got home pooped but happy!! (No pictures, I forgot the camera!)
Cheers