Rainbow serpent

Finally got my acrylics out and did the rainbow serpent, really pleased with how it's turned out and it looks great reduced to ATC size. Have picked out and cut background fabrics, almost ready to go. The mixing for most of the colours wasn't hard, I really need more paints, a good green and blue were difficult to create. Add that to the expense of having a knackered T key on my laptop and I'll keep wishing!

Snake sketches

Lazy (lacy!) Sunday

Wasn't going to post tonight but S has just come back from meeting up with two of our friends with not one but two how to play the guitar books. Be very afraid...

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Theme: favourite colour

Productive day in Aberdeen today, made it to both my ATC group and Aberdeen Art Gallery.

This month's theme is favourite colour. Usually it would be purple but actually I think my favourite colour is, as cj would put it, 'rainbow'. Time for a brainstorm. Things I love about:
red: love, warmth, blood relations, fire, courage, passion, freqency 480-405 THz
orange: still warmth, tangerines, tiggerine, life 510-480 THz
yellow: sunshine, daffodills, celandines, spring flowers, sand, buddhism 530-510 THz
green: growing things, hope, life, nature, spirit, youth, Islam 580-530 THz
blue blue: day, sea, sky, peace, my first blankie, sleep, blues 670-600 THz
indigo: comfy jeans, the night sky 670-700 THz
violet: violets, richness 700-790 THz

black: death (in a good way, peace), concealment
white: absence, lack, white page, snow

I love a rainbow (kaleidoscope, variegated, motely, psychdelic, vibrant, harlequin) as it is, today (well, last night) S rearranged my fruit teabags by colour and whilst I did laugh at him it did look damn good. 9 cards, 7 colours plus black and white?

Rainbows on Wikipedia - Rainbow serpent - aborginal, in control of water as most preciousresource in Australia, benevolent protector of its people, punisher of lawbreakers. Land, water, life, social, fertility. Greek and norse mythology, rainbow as a bridge. Bible - symbol of god's covenant with Noah.

At the top are two rainbows that I painted in acrylics on board, my effort at an aboriginal style rainbow serpent and a rainbow I created for cj.

Idea, 9 cards each with a rainbow serpent on, each with a background, 7 in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet with two more in black and white to make up the set. Use beads / sequins / metallic foil dots for aboriginal dots. Line space around serpent to make sure no colour blends in too much. Time to do some studies with my Rainforest book.

April theme ATCs

Dancer Pan

Finally finished off my ATCs (Artists Trading Cards) for this month's swap taking place tomorrow, I'm not usually so late. I go to a lovely group at the Seattle Quilt Company in Aberdeen once a month run for free by the very generous Fiona. Last month she showed us how to use foils so I duly bought some and have managed to use them in this set, they're actually very easy once you get used to them.

This month's theme was 'April' because I liked 'April Fool' and someone else liked 'April Showers' so 'April' was a compromise. ATCs are the size of playing cards and in fact playing cards were originally used for the backings, and I collect playing cards so using the jokers to illustrate 'April Fool' suited me perfectly. I don't have as many packs as I used to so, breaking my trend to date, there are only 2 designs in this set, one with and one without variations. These are my favourites, there were other jokers but most were a bit sinister. Dancer is from a beautiful reproduction pack of turn of the century art nouveau cards, and Pan from a Greek Mythology set I acquired on honeymoon in Rhodes.

I wanted to pad this set so scanned the two playing cards I liked into my computer, printed them off onto Crafty Computer Paper's wonderful sew on printable cotton, cut them out and layered spare fleece between the pictures and a backing of Pelmet Vilene. I couldn't quilt normally because of the stiffness of the Vilene so I stab stitched quilting round the designs and then stitched round the outside. If I'd had more time I would have liked to have hand stitched the edges, machine running stitch worked mostly fine but there were some pretty close calls on the edges.
Then I foiled the designs, I foiled all the staffs on the Pan cards and different elements of the Dancer cards, once I got the hang of the foil and leaving it to dry slightly I thought it worked really well.

Islamic architecture

Harpy at Kelvingrove

She's a harpy, I was captivated by the fact that she's not ugly but does look both beautiful and desperate, clawing at her right breast with her eagle's claw, does this beautiful figure distress her, does she want to rip away the human part of her soul? She isn't eagle from the waist down, rather, the sculptor has pictured her emerging from a rock, why this choice rather than showing the rest of her eagle body. This is just one of the many wonderful exhibitions at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. The gallery is wonderful in that everything is muddled up to make it more stimulating for visitors, in particluar for children. She's from the Expression gallery. The building itself is incredible. I would love to go back and have a stab at drawing this sculpture, the picture doesn't do it justice, the bust in the background is in better focus than her. When I go to Aberdeen this weekend I'm going to take the extra time to stop and draw after discovering last month that they have a Clive Barker head of Francis Bacon which is the epitome of both artist's work and personalities.