Just some stuff

Here are a few things I've been playing with over the last few days. Below is a piece of canvas that I've cleaned a paint brush on. Then I've added squares and circles using Mont Marte metallic oil pastels. I love squares and cirlces, anything geometric really. I've then outlined them first with a black sharpie but that wasn't heavy or dark enough, so then I went around them with a black glaze pen and got a better definition. Another one of my manila index files. I'd already stamped the bird cage and eggs. So I got out my new Lyra Aquacolour crayons and just randomly coloured in sections just to see how they work.

Smudged all aroung with a wet paint brush. The colours really come alive once water is added.

Then I outlined the water coloured sections with black and the cage and eggs with white. Still needs a lot of things added to it so it all makes sense. Maybe some birds or a tree or maybe just hidden away in a drawer. Who knows!

But it's fun to play and everytime I make something I learn, even if it's just colour combinations or what medium works best with different substrates.

I'm off to the dentist today for the last part of my filling under a crown. Please be advised......don't ever get a cavity under crown because it will cost you an arm and a leg to fix. $1,000.00 later (no that's not a typo). Thank goodness for health insurance, although I only got half back. The only blessing was the tooth didn't need to be numbed and I could speak without sounding like I had a mouthful of cotton wool and my dentist Allan is very nice. Although he totally ignores me when I tell him to stop looking around in my mouth for more work. I think he just wants another holiday in Bali!

Op Shop finds

Scouring the op shops the other day and came across this. It's a beautiful box covered in pale gold satin with olive green embroidery, open it up and inside is a photo album covered in the same fabric. I can take all the plastic sleeves off the pages and maybe turn it into an art journal. Or just take the guts out, make journal pages and use the cover. Who knows what will happen, it might just sit in a box with a whole heap of other bits and bobs the I have great ideas for. It was $8.00. The pale beige strip across the front is a suede fabric.

These are canvases that are about 11 cm x 24.5 cm and I'm not sure if they were commercial prints or someones home made ones. The backs are all covered and they have ready made hangers, so it's a bit hard to tell. Anyway I'll probably paint over them and do something with collage, stamping and perhaps just leave parts of the original prints showing through. They were 50 cents each. I also managed to get a couple really old knitting patterns, so old they were still priced as 3 shillings and fourpence. (Gawd, I remember using pounds, shillings and pence so that makes me really old). And I picked up an old childrens basic reader book published in 1962. It's got some cute pictures of little girls in puff sleeves and peter pan collars and mothers wearing frilly aprons. Those were the days!