WOYWW 804

 Welcome to Crafting With Jack and What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday, a day when we link up to Sarah's Craftshed and have a look to see what everyone has been doing. 

I started a watercolour of little squares and rectangles that I had seen in a tutorial by Wendy Soganik on one of the free courses.   Although I was quite pleased with the result when I took a photograph it was more obvious that my lines were decidedly wonky.  I decided to digitally alter that.  All the wonky ones were straightened out and looked much better.  Then I had a play with the colour blends!  The picture above is a selection of the results.  The original watercolour is A4 so these are quarters.  There is a second stage to the tutorial which I hope to get to this week.

There was a Women of The Word conference a couple of weeks ago.  The free downloads are available straight away so I have those although I didn’t manage to watch all of them.  I have been doing a study of women in the Bible. And did my first page yesterday. This is of Miriam, a prophet and sister to Moses.  

I had planned to use my brayers, but they were nowhere in sight so I used a palette knife to spread the paint and then did some stencilling. I wasn’t too sure I liked the result, but in the end carried on.  On the left handside is the page with some colour added digitally, on the right the actual page.  Now I haven’t actually stuck down my image so I may add to the background.  The image started off as a download from the course, but I wanted a stencil so I altered it, including a new head :) 

My workspace!  Tomorrow I must look for my brayers!

WOYWW 803

Welcome to Crafting With Jack and What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday, a day when we link up to Sarah's Craftshed and have a look to see what everyone has been doing. 

I added wax to some backgrounds I made last week with my rock pigment watercolours, and then polished them until the colour stopped coming off. I tried Liquitex on a couple of others.  Both the Wax and the Liquitex worked at sealing the paint and stop the colour coming off on my fingers all the time.  The left hand side are the originals and the right are sealed.

The paints seem to grow a little mould every day, I have been scraping off and throwing the mould part away, so I decided to top them up with distilled water, but the mould floated to the top!   I decided to do some more backgrounds with them today.  I had a very happy play!  The first background I did the paint was very patchy and I decided to mix in some PVA glue with the paint.  I added quite a bit and made lots of brush marks.  The second one I used a fine hole stencil mesh, I couldn't get a print by laying paper over the stencil so I put the stencil that had been on the paper on fresh paper and repeated a few times.  then I pressed the paper onto the painted paper and did a few lift offs.  The bottom layer is actually the same colour as the rest, but came out different.

I had several bottles of the PVA glue and I decided to mix the watercolours with it.  I had some very old ink bottles, which you can see above.  The watercolours turned from slightly lumpy to very smooth and I think a better colour.  I guess the proof will be in the using, stay tuned for more news :)

The desk!

I just had to share this with you.  My talented granddaughter made me a niffler for my birthday - a creature from The Fantastic Beasts films - and a fabulous Hogwarts card with a little note in an envelope asking me to look after the niffler from Newt Scamander himself.

Wishing you all a great week!  Angela x

WOYWW 802

Welcome to Crafting With Jack and What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday, a day when we link up to Sarah's Craftshed and have a look to see what everyone has been doing.

Beautiful birthday flowers from my daughter for tomorrow.

The natural rock pigments I bought on holiday are proving to be the worst buy ever!   I mixed the powder with the Gum Arabic and honey - a lot of stirring.  A couple of colours just did not want mix, phthalo green was the worst one.  The tiniest bit of powder stains and it seemed to jump out the pot of its own accord!  The mixing took me the best part of two days.   I thought I would try various brushes and brush strokes also I wasn’t sure how much water to use.  All of these were on dry paper, so next stage is wet on wet.  At one point I got a little frustrated and added some Liquitex, which is the darkest shade above.  

I visited my niece yesterday, she is expecting her second baby in February, such exciting news!

 

WOYWW 801

 Welcome to Crafting With Jack and What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday, a day when we link up to Sarah's Craftshed and have a look to see what everyone has been doing.

Apologies for being MIA last week.  Every piece of my craft stuff is now in from the caravan and it totally mucked up my tidy room!  I thought I had allowed space for when it came in, but I was way out in my estimates!  It is however, packed away now and I really must come up with a better plan for next year!  We are staying with MIL for two more weeks before Christmas, but I shall not be taking too much with me.  

This is my room today, 

The stamps I bought at a charity shop for £1.

I have been working in one of my concertina books.  This is the one that caused the most bother and had fold lines in the wrong places.  So I did those pages first. I used some of my pencil crayon sketches from a few years ago.

I treated myself to one of these atomisers, it changes colour and makes the room smell lovely.  I have geranium in it at the moment. 

My husband treated himself to a waterfall.  Then we shopped for plants.   We managed to get a circular base for the whole thing to sit on.  It sounds lovely, but not with the television on :)

I look forward to catching up with you all later x Angela x