I treated myself to a butterfly punch stamp today and using some lovely card I made some almost 3D butterfly cards:
As well as having interesting designs on one side, the card I used is also coloured on the reverse, making the wings look lovely regardless of whether they are being looked at from above or underneath.
I have a large (well, large for me!) festival/craft fair coming up in September, hopefully, a range of these cards will go down a treat alongside some of my paintings and prints.
I have a bit of a thing about butterflies at the moment and spent the afternoon making them out of paper:
The orange lines in my previous post were not growing on me at all, in fact they were beginning to annoy!
Initial thoughts about how to improve them centred around covering them up but I thought that I would just end up making them look worse. Instead I went for enhancement, using chalk pastels. I used a combination of raw sienna, yellow, orange and white which I then blended. I really like this painting, now that it has been ‘tweaked’:
I was lucky enough to have the luxury of painting in the garden for what seemed like several hours today. I can’t believe how long this painting took me, it looks quite simple really:
In this painting, I have tried to use a variety of techniques, from using salt in the sky to using both paper and white oil pastel to highlight different areas. I’m not totally convinced about the orange lines within the green but hopefully they will grow on me.
A few weeks ago I sketched a meconopsis, today I decided it was time to put this flower in to a painting:
This evening I made a card. I wanted to make it really personal and individual and am really pleased with the result.
This is a Miami Florida Blue Butterfly:
I used watercolour pencils and pastels. I think I’ll try some more cards in a similar style over the next few weeks.
There seems to be snobbery where salt is concerned. Some say that only the more expensive salt gives a good flavour, others say that it all comes from the same place and so doesn’t really matter.
However, when it comes to soaking up watercolour paint, the bigger the crystals and the more expensive the salt, the better the effect! I discovered this when I used some very cheap salt, found at the back of a cupboard, to try and create a watery effect on a painting. It didn’t really work, but I quite like the painting anyway!
I have been inspired (yet again) by the colourful houses that overlook the River Avon and Bristol Docks. As for the balloon, well, apart from the annual balloon fiesta here in august, there are often balloons to be seen flying over the Bristol skies, we even have them fly over our garden, sometimes so low that we can talk to the people in the basket!!
I may well try another painting similar to this one but on a larger sheet of paper, then I can hopefully include plenty of water (with salt) as well as some different tones for the grass and the sky.
It was about this time last year when I was considering whether or not to take up watercolour painting. I didn’t know whether I would enjoy it or whether I would be any good at it. Whilst trying to decide which ‘craft’ I wanted to have a go at, I dabbled a little with making pictures on canvas, out of beads. One such canvas was an image of some rolling countryside and a sun with sky-wide rays. I used this image as my inspiration for the painting that I did today:
I used finely ground salt on the sun’s rays and I love the effect it has had on them. I may well try this kind of painting again with some different colour mixes.
Well, I’m not so sure about the ‘better’ but I do like this larger, more blue version of a painting that I did recently. Last time, it took me less than 30 minutes, this time it was more like 1.5 hours but I am equally pleased with the result:
I’ve spent some time painting bluebells today, I was inspired by a photo that I saw recently. There were great swathes of blue-purple, mixed in with some greenery from the surrounding trees and ferns. However, I’m not sure that I’m totally happy with the painting, I may well try to improve it tomorrow.
Instead, I thought I’d post a photo of another blue flower picture, this time a mecanopsis:
This was painted using watercolour pencils, the effect on the petals was created by sprinkling salt sparingly when the blue and purple were still wet. Once dry, I carefully scraped the salt off, I think it looks a bit like dew. I’ll definitely be using this flower for a larger painting in the near future. I think it would work really well over a background similar to the one I used for my blue/purple tulips recently.
Brush, Needle & Whisk 